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Comment by moondowner | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Rancher Desktop as an alternative to Docker Desktop, https://rancherdesktop.io/ on macOS and Windows, it's pretty solid.

It has some kinks to work out but I got it working with IDEs too (e.g. the Intellij IDEA Docker Compose integration to work with it).

What I also like is that existing scripts and etc that use the docker-compose cli work with Rancher Desktop too, as it uses nerdctl https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl

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Rancher Desktop is great, because kubernetes just works. Not only that, you can "docker build" an image, and then immediately spin it up as a kubernetes pod, without spending ten minutes googling the correct commands to correctly "load" the image.

Yup +1 for Rancher Desktop. Works as smooth as Docker Desktop on MacOS.

Been using Rancher Desktop for 2 years, can definitely recommend this as an alternative to Docker Desktop.

We just completed the switch to Rancher where I work. 1200ish engineers, mostly on Macs. So far it's worked out pretty well..fewer hiccups than I expected.

Does it use the same "containers are really just running in a Linux VM" approach as Docker Desktop on macOS?

unless you run osx on a Linux kernel, it will always be so.

not a personal attack on you, but it blows my mind how clueless the current generation of developers become after the docker phase.

I don't understand this comment on any level.

Containers will only ever be on a linux kernel or VM? Never natively on ANY other OS? Only Linux containers exist?

Developers were more clueful about containers before Docker made them wildly popular?

“Only Linux containers exist?“

In practice, yes.

Windows containers absolutely exist in practice.

Yeah, but how often are they needed?

My last job we ran very significant public workloads on windows containers. I don’t know the number of requests but it’s a multi million user application all around the world.

Interesting; I may be biased because I've been involved in helping teams containerize as part of a cloud migration and only one or two cases has there been a real 'need', basically for running a Windows service that was eventually retired in favour of a lambda triggered by consuming a message in a queue.

We were waaaaay too big to fit in lambda layers. Our containers were 8GB when I left, and that was using all sorts of tricks on the host infra to share data between running containers.

The root of the problem was we had third party tools which were windows only.

> unless you run osx on a Linux kernel, it will always be so

Linux is not the only OS that has container like things. FreeBSD had jails years earlier, Solaris had something else which I don't remember any more, and for all I know macOS may have their own native equivalent as well.

Bear in mind that Apple introduced an official hypervisor framework a few releases ago, so they could be doing something similar for containers. It wouldn't be a bad idea. :)

personal attack or not, you could have just left that last bit off and had a good comment.

There's always been a mythos of a true developer. Here's a rant from 1983 about how real programmers don't use Pascal. https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html

Kids these days...

I really like the whole Rancher ecosystem. Setting up a cluster with rancher is such a pleasant experience.

Currently it is the best alternative I have used, in what concerns the same experience as Docker Desktop on Windows.

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