Minikube does try to be more “correct”, so it’s possibly better strictly for learning kubernetes or hacking on k8s itself.
Rancher Desktop is fully Apache 2 licensed, so I think that shouldn't be an issue — even if it somehow ends up closed source at one point, at worst somebody can start a fork from the last public release and go from there.
Our release process for Windows & Linux literally involves pulling the build from GitHub, attaching signatures on top, and pushing the bits back up. (There's some QA in the middle, but that doesn't change the bits.) The only reason we don't do that for Mac is because we haven't sorted out the signing there using this flow.
Note that Docker Desktop wasn't open source (but the core Docker engine was), which is why they can start charging money for the binaries and not worry about somebody making a fork.
Having said that — feel free to continue using kubectl to do everything; whatever floats your boat is good :)
My options on this physical machine as I see it are: lima, rancher desktop, or Docker Desktop itself. I don't actually use Rancher Desktop for its Kubernetes integration, and in earlier versions it wasn't even possible to do this without weird vague workarounds, but now it has an "Off" switch, and I use it for the rare occasion that I need to run container images locally, or a kind cluster.
I ruled out Docker Desktop because I can't use it alongside of other VMs (not because it doesn't work, which I understood to be true for Windows users, but because it is composed of a virtual machine, with a memory footprint, and one shouldn't have too many of those unless you have a beast of a laptop...) and because it requires paid volume licensing. Don't get me wrong, I like to pay for things, but I also like to evaluate alternatives!
I used this for a while: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/blob/master/examples/k8s.yam...
It wasn't quite perfectly stable, also not maintained by the Kubernetes core team but externally, so it has to play catch-up a bit when releases are done, rather than in the case of KinD it can enjoy a release on the schedule with Kubernetes.
I am a kubeadm baseline user and I find that Kind is actually the best way to do experiments (I don't use MiniKube at all so can't compare) Some experiments require a bit more control of the VM that runs your CRI and for those there are raw nodes (physical machines) or a Lima VM for a convincing approximation of one.
When there's a need to go to production, I'm generally not using any of these choices, but I am using KinD quite extensively (even on remote nodes!) through tailscale. This is actually really nice.
Are you using Docker Desktop? (Do you pay?) That is the benefit and that's literally all I use Rancher Desktop for. A Docker Desktop replacement. It also works with KinD, that was my whole point. Since one might assume it doesn't work (or maybe they tried in the past and found it didn't work at some point in the past) – today it works great.
If you have another alternative to suggest how you can run KinD on MacOS, I'm all ears. I'm literally using a full stack open source approach, to pay a gatekeeper in order to access it from my MacOS workstation seems like an anti-thesis to me.
Started using it for container management, and have been pleased.