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Comment by PufPufPuf | Hacker News Reader

I'm a fan of Rancher Desktop -- it has everything integrated and working out of the box, it can even provide the CLI tools like docker, kubectl or helm for you.

On the other hand, in Podman Desktop, you can't even use an image from Podman Desktop docker in Podman Desktop kubernetes without extra steps. I'd recommend it only if you want Podman specifically. If you just want to run docker and/or kubernetes, I'd go with Rancher Desktop.

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The Rancher Desktop VM with k8s enabled has about 10% continuous cpu usage at idle on my 2019 MBP. I really wish there was something I could do to reduce that.

That is almost certainly the etcd binaries on the vm chatting to itself. I would expect k3s should have lower CPU usage as they (by default) jettison etcd for an embedded db

Having said that, aside from the general WTF of something burning CPU, does in impact you in some way? Battery drain, sluggish apps, memory hog (I'd bet on that one), other?

The deck of the MBP is definitely warmer with RD idling in the background. Does it practically impact anything I'm working on? No. Does it tickle the OCD related neurons in my brain? Yes and I hate that.

I just turn it on and off as needed instead of leaving it running all the time.

If you want something more general purpose, Canonical Multipass has a good sample docker setup. Annoyingly, This is the only Canonical product I can recommend at this point.

I use it with MacOS. I assume WSL is a better choice for Windows laptops, and there’s no reason to add a VM to get docker on Linux.

https://multipass.run/docs/docker-how-to

I liked Multipass until I ran into storage corruption issues like many others [1][2] and broke all my VMs. On MacOS, Multipass uses qemu in which the apple-hvf support isn't getting much updates after 2021 [3].

[1]: https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/3455 [2]: https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/3235 [3]: https://github.com/qemu/qemu/commits/master/accel/hvf

Thanks for the heads up.

Re: quemu and apple hvf that’s really sad news.

The VM disk corruption problem has been affecting all open source Apple hvf hypervisors. lima with vfkit or UTM are most promising ones for now: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/issues/1957#issuecomment-182..., https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/pull/2026, https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/pull/5919

Has someone ever tried both Rancher Desktop and OrbStack on macOS?

I love OrbStack but I never heard of Rancher Desktop before, maybe I should try it

Yes! Maybe I’m always expecting the wrong thing with Podman Desktop, but I can’t ever get it to work the way I expect it to - on Windows or Mac.

Rancher Desktop, however, has been a breeze. Same with using Lima.[0]

With Lima:

  limactrl create template://docker

[0] https://lima-vm.io/

There's also Colima, which allows you to run "colima start --kubernetes" to set up everything with Lima. However it needs some additional setup with the CLI tooling, so I rather recommend Rancher Desktop.

...and on Linux running the actual docker daemon, of course.

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