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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

When Docker went hard on subscriptions, my company pivoted to Rancher Desktop as the replacement.

I can't stress enough how much I dislike Rancher. I know we moved to it as a cost saving measure as I am assuming we would have to buy subs for Docker.

Yet there is nothing I found easier to use than Docker proper. Rancher has a Docker compatible mode and it falls down in various ways.

Now that this has happened, I wonder if Rancher is pulling by default from the Docker Hub registry, in which case now we'll need to setup our own registry for images we use, keep them up to date etc. Which feels like it would be more costly than paying up to Docker to begin with.

All this makes me almost miss Vagrant boxes.

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If you're on Mac worth checking out the commercial https://orbstack.dev/

Reasonable price for better dev efficiency. Free for personal use.

Or Colima https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Free, open source, and has worked perfectly for me so far. (I think I briefly ran into issues with an Elastic Search container? so ymmv a bit)

Given that Rancher is the company standard I don't see a good reason to use something unsupported by our IT team.

Out of curiosity, have you considered and/or tried Podman? Granted I don't do anything fancy with it, but for my use cases it's worked great.

Even if I have doesn't matter, Rancher is what we are suppose to use, and not using it means you're out of step with whats supported and such, which I don't find to be a good place to be.

Do you mean "Rancher" Rancher, or Rancher Desktop? Those are two different things. I have found the latter to be a Just Works™ app that's miles ahead of Podman Desktop. Now, that one is a mess.

Rancher Desktop.

Neither are drop in replacements for Docker Desktop, that much I am certain about, thus far.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't set up your own mirror regardless, it costs peanuts and it's much faster

Like with everything, it all depends.

The team that will have to do this won't have it as a priority, and unfortunately that means it'll always lag behind.

Some of this I realize is company quirk specific, but even if we had our own mirror it doesn't negate the problem entirely.

That's... depressing.

Can you elaborate a little on what you don't like about Rancher? Have been looking at moving my org over to it (30 engineers), seems quite nice so far - built-in in k3s is great and it works well on my macbook

Its docker drop in support is lacking. There are instances where I expect it to do something and it errors or does something bizarre.

The interface is very basic. I had to get plugins for very basic functionality that has been built into Docker Desktop for years, like Logs Explorer.

It seemingly always prompts for Admin Access on the computer, even though Docker long ago stopped doing this and has worked without admin access for some time.

The prompt for enabling admin access is funny. If you don't have it already, it will prompt you to enable it, if you have it enabled, it will pop up another window, very similar, and the wording will say "Startup Rancher Desktop without administrator access" but its easy to miss the wording difference, cause the font is small.

I've had stability issues, containers randomly crashing or the daemon going down out of nowhere. Happened more than once.

It claims to be a drop in for Docker CLI, but while I don't have the list handy at the moment, I know this isn't true, particularly with docker-compose

I could go on, but its still really rough around the edges.

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