Podman Desktop celebrates 500k downloads
blog.podman.io
blog.podman.io
What trickery does OrbStack[0] use to be fast?
We went back to Podman Desktop because of the license[1], but the interactions on macOS are almost as slow as Docker Desktop.
As for Podman itself, happy users here, and our workflows have been working for a while now. We are only missing faster local development.
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You can do this yourself via multipass, it's an interesting solution specifically on Apple Silicon because nested virtualization is not available and lxc does not require a hypervisor .
By "we" I assume you're referring to your company/employer, so I'm curious if there's any way the license could be more palatable short of being 100% free?
Also, the rest of the page implies OrbStack will be charging for any commercial use.
If this is the case, I don’t see how this is “free” in the sense that most people on this site interpret it. Have you thought about the FOSS model with support, maybe a Jetbrains style thing - adding enterprise/paid features on top of the FOSS stack?
However, I think referring to something as "free" when it's explicitly "free right now and probably not later" is a bit misleading. I doubt GP was trying to pull any wool over any eyes. In the enterprise context, especially, the differentiation is pretty important. Also, the page I linked does imply that it will become not free in the lunch sense of the term, for commercial users (already not free in the libre sense of the term, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that).
I have no problem paying for quality products, which OrbStack appears to be … but developers hear the words “license” or “free” and then get hopeful they can get a free lunch.
As such, a suggestion, just remove this line from your FAQ:
“Educational and non-profit open-source licenses subject to approval. Commercial open-source developers must purchase a license.”
Talking about open source in the same context of a paid subscription might be confusing people.
It's making some useful work though. It's only going to be free for non-profits who develop open-source software.
(I work at a non-profit which makes some closed-source software, and I'm an Orbstack user, so I expect to pay when the time comes)
Out of curiosity: is it for internal use?
Thanks for pointing that line out — just reworded it to be more clear.
So there's only 1 VM, running a modified Linux kernel (https://github.com/orbstack/linux-macvirt/commits/mac-pub) with a barebones userland. Then inside there's a bunch of souped-up chroots (probably LXC/LXD), running the various linux distribution VMs as well as one that just runs `dockerd`.
Here it specifies that all the VMs share 1 kernel: https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture#linux-machines
On top of this, it's fast because it uses Rosetta (which is very fast) and kdrag0n spent a lot of time optimizing various parts of the kernel and the resulting environment.
Developer time is probably your most expensive resource. Saving $8/mo at the cost of dev time seems… suboptimal.
A) forced changes which can eat your “savings”
B) rent seeking (or: non-optional price increases like I’ve experienced with gitlab)
C) The company pivots and leaves your tool behind to languish
With that said, we have yet to see if Podman can stand the test of time.
Millions of people flocked to Threads because of a dust-up on Twitter... and then immediately went back to Twitter. Can Podman manage to keep it's traction and continue growing... that will be something to see.
Hopefully, podman can solve "basic dcoker desktop" needs for most companies.
Seems like they can afford it.
But I think a charity could fall under the 3rd one here.
"Examples of freely permitted usage include:
Personal projects with less than $10 million revenue per year Students and teachers (whether in an educational or professional setting) Research at not-for-profit institutions Personal contributions to non-commercial open source projects"
what is this, the world's most overstaffed lemonade stand?
250 employees earning the median US wage is 11 million per year to the employee before all sorts of overhead so more like 20 million in wages per year.
AR == Argentinian Peso
542k ARS == $1600 USD
So I guess I’ll ask some questions:
1) Is the Argentinian software labor pool large and organized enough to be accessible to international firms?
2) Is this the average wage of a software developer in Argentina? Or some larger group?
3) Why is this relevant in this discussion?
There is a point that offshore contractors getting access to such software represents a ... larger proportion of compensation, especially among the several such SaaS per-user fees most tech companies will pay.
But there's also a counterpoint... docker wants somewhere between $5 and $30 US dollars per month per user, yes this is annoying because the value doesn't seem to be there for docker desktop which is all most people want anyway... on the other hand it's not such a moral issue... it's not much money at all.
Nope, ISO 4217 says it's ARS.
AR is the ISO 3166 contry code for Argentina.
> 1) Is the Argentinian software labor pool large and organized enough to be accessible to international firms?
Yes?
> 2) Is this the average wage of a software developer in Argentina? Or some larger group?
Average wage of Argentina.
> 3) Why is this relevant in this discussion?
People like to think people only live in the US.
This is a low bar for ethical business practices.
If lure people to my ecosystem with low prices and then jack them up later when the switching costs are high, it's fine if they can afford it?
If the electric company jacked their rates by 10X for consumers who make over 100K a year would that be fine since "they can afford it"?
If grocery store A started charging $30 for walking into the store, you better bet everyone’s gonna head to grocery store B.
Of course there are also organizational differences, Podman seems to be more of a community led open-source project whereas Rancher is ultimately trying to sell enterprise kubernetes management software.
In my experience, k3s looks great on the surface but I ran into quite a few issues operating it in a single-node use case.
If I was looking into this today, I'd definitely explore Podman/Kind instead.
The main rationale for using Rancher is that the CLI is the same as Docker. No modification to any script was needed.
Podman might be better, I can't say, but for what I use it for it doesn't really matter.
https://ubuntu.com/blog/replacing-docker-desktop-on-windows-...
It runs on windows too.
That’s probably the most noxious business model ever. I’ve dealt with 5-6 companies doing that, and whenever renewal/retention is a different sales organization, i spin up a company project to plan the exit strategy.
The nickel and dime cost stuff is one thing, but the bigger problem is that these companies and products always decline.
If you spend a million dollars a year on a contract, you will typically have someone you know by name and meet with regularly who will legitimately hear your feedback and work to resolve your problems.
Customer support will file a ticket for me when something isn't working. Maybe help if something on their script matches existing known issues. Customer success will proactively see that I'm not getting the expected value from my already committed spending and utilization and reach out to make sure everything is configured right so that I renew next year.
Docker has no moat.
They just want an easy installer that lets them "run docker containers" and they don't want to even think about a Linux VM. Even many developers can't be bothered to deal with this stuff and just want some easy abstraction. This is where Docker Desktop has value and why some people will continue paying for it.
it is only Docker Desktop which is no longer free.
most power users do not use or need Docker Desktop.
I mean I use Windows too (my laptop has poor Linux support, plus Proton wasn't a thing when I bought it so I went for something which is guaranteed to run games well). But I do all my development in a Linux VM in Virtualbox. If you have an SSD, performance is indistinguishable from native.
In my experience this is very much not the case. Running a graphical linux desktop in a VM on beefy hardware still introduces noticeable keypress latency for me, as an example.
Initialize timed out due to slow proxy speeds, so I had to use "podman machine start" at the command line to wait for the image download and install to complete. For whatever reason I couldn't start using the UI after a reboot because I got an EACCESS error and again command line worked which was then acknowledged as running via the UI.
This is in an environment where the end-user has no root and podman is running in rootless mode. Once I got it running, I was able to crank up x86 http and postgres containers from the command line mostly with no issues, although pod termination seems to work better from the UI. In fact starting containers at command line throws a warning that your container architecture doesn't match your host architecture but that's it and podman just carries on after that.
When you say x86-64, is there something special about 64-bit containers that makes them only work via the UI?
Docker CE does not offer an emulation layer for x86(-64) on ARM, to my knowledge.
https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-machine-ini...
Error: OCI runtime error: runc: runc create failed: cannot use rootless systemd cgroups manager on cgroup v1
> If it were in somewhere critical I'd worry.
Looks like you can enable the rootless systemd cgroups manager by adding
systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=1
Do you need Docker (CLI and Desktop) installed? Or, you should uninstall them first?
Lightweight, native app, drop in replacement. It is funny that you need to launch an entire web browser to then launch a single container.
Personal use: free Business and commercial use: $8/user/mo "