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Comment by mdeeks | Hacker News Reader

It's worse than that if you're a business. If you simply want to use Docker Desktop on Mac, you're required to get Docker Team ($15/user/mo for <100 users) or Docker Business ($24/user/mo for 100+ users). Even if you want literally zero of the cloud features you're required to pay this amount.

I highly recommend OrbStack (https://orbstack.dev/) instead. It's $8/user/mo for businesses and you get something that is faster, easier on your battery, and more simple to use. We switched hundreds of engineers over to it at Instacart and it was seamless.

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So I can run orbstack and then still use "docker run ..." etc commands like usual?

I'm pretty happy with docker desktop generally, but looks like it stopped updating for the version of osx I'm using on my 2019 intel mbpro, so I'll definitely consider alternatives for it there ...

Thanks for sharing !

Yes. The same docker commands, including docker-compose, all still work.

It just sets a new "docker context" that points to OrbStack's socket file instead. You can instantly switch back to Docker Desktop with a simple `docker context use desktop-linux` command. So it's nearly zero cost to just try it out.

  $ docker context ls
  NAME         DESCRIPTION                               DOCKER ENDPOINT
  default      Current DOCKER_HOST based configuration   unix:///var/run/docker.sock
  orbstack *   OrbStack                                  unix:///Users/mdeeks/.orbstack/run/docker.sock

OrbStack had the most noticeable difference for our users who were still on Intel Macbooks. It made mine stop spinning up fans randomly.

Colima should work on a 2019 MacBook

Rancher Desktop is free, supports Mac OS 10.15.7, and provides a much nicer Kubernetes distribution out-of-the-box compared to Docker Desktop.

https://rancherdesktop.io/

It also provides the Docker CLI and nearly the same features as Docker Desktop. In fact, some Docker Desktop extensions can run on Rancher Desktop.

Do note Rancher Desktop is more oriented for Kubernetes, so most of the GUI is for managing the Kubernetes cluster rather than individual containers.

OrbStack deserves all that money

Why not Colima?

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