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Comment by lopkeny12ko | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the need for Docker Desktop. When you install the docker-ce package, you get the docker client CLI and dockerd daemon managed as a systemd service. I have never seen anyone build or run images outside of the CLI. Why are people paying for a GUI wrapper?

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Docker Desktop takes care of all the annoying config work needed to make Docker work on Windows, including managing virtual machine engines, configuring the windows firewall and the necessary magic to mount local drives in containers. Using Docker on Windows without Docker Desktop is a massive PITA.

It's trivial in WSL, but debatable whether you can really call that "on Windows".

Docker desktop is essentially just a GUI on a WSL2 vm image at this point.

Docker desktop creates and manages Linux VM with docker engine inside. It also does some magic to allow mounting host directories inside containers. I've yet to reproduce that magic, TBH.

It's obviously important for macOS, because macOS does not support docker containers.

While Windows supports docker containers, most docker containers are built for Linux, so Docker Desktop is important for Windows as well.

Now for Linux you can run docker engine on the host, if you're proficient with Linux. However some people use Docker Desktop on Linux as well. I could imagine that you can run very old host Linux this way.

I, personally, avoid docker desktop on macOS. Right now I'm using remote Linux VM and in the future I'll use Linux in VM, configured manually. However I've yet to find out how to mount host directories inside that VM containers. Some magic.

Mainly Windows users, followed by OSX I suspect.

It's actually more important on OSX because there is no equivalent of WSL.

Lima and colima fill the gap nicely

On Windows and Mac, Docker Desktop is the only way to install Docker. If you work for a big company that isn't using Linux then you need to pay just to use Docker.

I've used docker on windows a lot and it never even occurred to me to install Docker Desktop. I just use normal docker inside of WSL since that's where I do all my actual work when I have to use windows. It pretty much works exactly like Linux from what I recall although I can't test it now because my windows machine is broken.

Because people on Windows like GUIs instead of being stuck on MS-DOS like experience?

And people on Linux like CLIs instead of being stuck on Win95 like experience.

Actually they are frozen on 1970's Bell Labs world, without realising how the world has progressed.

I think we just have to agree to disagree. My point was, modern Windows is nothing like Windows 95, just like modern command line experience is nothing like MS-DOS (as you seem to imply). Given a choice I strongly prefer command line for most tasks. Reducing my preference to ignorance rubs me in a wrong way.

Having been there when there was no other option, yes I pretty much consider some people prefer to be stuck in the past of green and amber phosphor terminals, like admiring the golden age of punch cards with diagonal red lines to avoid losing the deck order.

I love seeing this comment in a thread about OCI containers ( a deeply Linux technology ). This whole discussion is about the abstraction that people hav to use on Windows to make it work.

When you want to talk about how the world has progressed, I guess you do not mean Kubernetes or Docker. Give me an example of how Windows has changed the world in the last 30 years.

COM as universal technology to share commercial libraries, language agnostic.

Also the basis to share document manipulation across applications.

An usable 3D API, that has to be emulated on Linux, as not even Android developers care to port their games.

Making computing mainstream for non technical users, where locating where a file was saved is already a challenge in itself.

As for OCI containers, we are back in the 1970's, Linux is catching up with what IBM already did back then, still misses some of the cool capabilities of their mainframes.

It wasn't even the first as, Tru64 and HP-UX Vaults had the first container like capabilities in late 1990's, followed by Solaris Zones, BSD jails.

This is a hilarious comment because windows ignored the developer experience for YEARS with its horrible command line experience. Windows was a regression. Linux/unix, which powers the world by the way, is where it is at regardless of how old its foundations are.

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