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Comment by agilob | Hacker News Reader

> it quite sad to see reactions on HN regarding the introduction of Docker Desktop subscription model.

Docker Desktop for Mac simply sucks. It starts slowly, has slow UX, burns CPU all the time even when not active and no container instance is running. They recently added that "you have to upgrade now" popup and it feels updates are more frequent. I might be biased here due to poor UX with the popups, updates were smoother before. If I'm to pay for it, I really would like to have better experience using it. I can run VSCode, IntelliJ and Firefox with dozen of tabs open and my mac isn't as hot as when running docker desktop.

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> popup and it feels updates are more frequent

When was the last time it asked you for the system password to update, though?

I think they botched it because mine just doesn’t update anymore. It keeps asking and I press “Install & restart” but it doesn’t do anything!

You need to manually quit it, then start again - the update will be installed at that point. I agree though, horrible UX.

If it sucks so much then why are you using it? There must be a reason, right? And if there's such a compelling reason that you're using it despite how much it sucks, that means it's worth something?

I use it to support other developers, mostly juniors who need help with docker and are unfamiliar with cli.

I believe training junior developers, is a completely valid situation to pay a fee for. Not sure why everything should be free.

This is absolutely not my experience with Docker for Mac. I've been using it daily for years and can't remember a single issue I had with it. Performance is also adequate, even when running many containers, though usually not more than 10 or so. I use a base model MacBook Pro 16".

Same. Docker definitely had some performance issues on Mac a few years ago but it's fine now.

It still seems to suck battery life on my 13” Intel MBP. But aside from starting to nag me to keep upgrading, that’s about my only complaint.

Does Docker consume battery, or the actual app itself? I don’t have much extra power consumption from the UI app, as to be expected.

you must be running tiny containers - I spin up a dozen containers and run a few tests every day. The entire test suite takes 45 minutes on my mac and 25 on linux. Docker for mac performance is atrocious

Do you have any speed data for Docker via Docker Desktop (the tool in question) versus a manually setup Docker Mac setup?

You can’t compare Docker between OSes, and blame Docker after you chose to use an OS that doesn’t support the necessary primitives.

Whether you like the tool or not, they are free to charge for it. Clearly there’s a market > yourself.

Docker on an M1 Mac is inconsistent too. Generally it works fine but not always. It uses qemu and doesn't always surface qemu errors when you're building images (you can see the errors when you're running containers, so less of a problem there). They complete build "successfully" and look like valid images when they aren't. I've had multiple k8s deployments fail locally on minikube and on GKE/EKS because of bad images built by Docker on my M1 Mac. The solution is generally rebuild until it works or use my 10 year old Intel-based Mac, but those are bad solves.

Docker shouldn't be charging anyone for that inconsistent experience.

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