I spent about an hour with Rancher Desktop when I was really pissed off about the Docker Desktop licensing change. There were a few things that out of the box were a problem for me (note: really a problem with nerdctl/containerd):

1. nerdctl did not support registry mirrors for image pulls. This is an obvious blocker for some uses cases.

2. with Docker Desktop you can bind container ports to any interface on the host system, including e.g. ip aliases on localhost. It didn't seem to be possible with nerdctl using whatever VM backend Rancher is using.

2a. I'm not sure how this works today, but with Docker Desktop a `docker pull` can interact with a registry available on the host's localhost address (i.e. through an SSH tunnel established on the host). This worked with Rancher, but I believe I had to edit /etc/hosts inside the Rancher-controlled VM to point at a different IP address, whereas with Docker Desktop it just worked.

I also seemed to recall needing to manually start things with Rancher, i.e. just having the app open was not enough for docker/kubectl/nerdctl to be ready to go. But I don't remember at this point.

These are all (I hope) uncommon and weird use cases, but they are the sort of thing that will keep some people using Docker Desktop instead of an alternative. They are, for better or worse, the value add of Docker Desktop.

Personally I'd prefer to use open-source tools if possible.

For Podman vs Rancher, what are pros and cons? If you only use Docker from the command line is there any reason to use Rancher?