It’s sluggish, it’s incredibly bloated with all the services that Docker (the company) wants to sell you and the UI is badly designed.

OrbStack is my go-to when it comes to running docker on Mac. It also uses macOS native containerization APIs so containers will be a bit more performant than they would (at least use to) be on Docker Desktop.

Another good approach if you’re fine without a GUI or want to bring your own is just ‚brew install docker‘.