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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

I've found Docker Desktop to be equally awful with Windows. You'd think they'd care about giant swathes of the market like that.

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> I've found Docker Desktop to be equally awful with Windows. You'd think they'd care about giant swathes of the market like that.

The fact that they don't care, and yet you (or if not you, others) still use it, succinctly explains why they do not care.

If they have a shitty, buggy client for Mac/Windows, and people complain about it but still use it, then they have no incentive to care.

Actually, I did like jandrese did, and got our solutions out of docker.

It's hard to complain to much about a free product that is a side line to the companies main business... Oh wait, we just lost the free version and it's now the companies main monetization scheme? Well now I care a lot about the little annoying bugs I've been dealing with for the last 3 years.

I use it only when some required tool is only available via docker. It is not a choice for us for any of our development.

I've found it to be really good on Windows 10 Pro, even with 6 year old hardware.

I've been using it full time since 2018 and it's been nothing but really fast and as stable as you can ask for given how complex of a tool it is. It rarely crashes (maybe once every few months) and I've built thousands of images across many different tech stacks.

We de-dockerized our Windows deployments because it was causing no end of headaches for the end users.

Wish they fixed the issue where it uses all available RAM even when running no containers yet.

That’s not an issue though. That’s just how virtual machines work. You’re carving out a chunk of your system for the docker Linux VM that runs your containers.

You can open up the docker app and configure a smaller amount of ram if it impacts your host OS

No, that's not how it works with WSL2 as the backend. You then cannot configure a smaller amount of RAM in the docker app, it's greyed out. One can limit the RAM that WSL has, but that's not really helpful when docker steals all of it. (And WSL2 supports dynamic allocation of memory anyways, so it's supposed to return unused memory to the host)

So you are wrong. For those of us affected by the bug, it's a big issue.

Linux considers unused RAM to be wasted RAM. WSL 2 addresses this with a Linux kernel change that right now is insiders only. I expect it to land with Windows 11.

You can configure the max memory in wsl 2 with .wslconfig file.

yes, but docker will eat whatever I give to it, leaving nothing for the actual containers or other stuff in wsl

That's not how virtual machines work on Windows. Even Linux virtual machines use dynamic memory. You assign a minimum, maximum, and a startup value. When the machine needs more RAM, Windows give it to it. When it releases it, it's available for other purposes.

When running no containers? I've found that it's a problem when one is running (the solution to that is here[1]), but I've not experienced it when nothing is running.

[1] https://blog.simonpeterdebbarma.com/2020-04-memory-and-wsl/

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