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Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement

650 points by emersonrsantos 5y ago

komarlaheight 5y ago
judge2020 5y ago
Podman also has a docker desktop alternative in the works (Already works on Mac IIRC)[0]. Will be interesting to see how these two solutions play out. 0: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/11494 https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/11494
- up_o 5y ago
  I've been using podman on wsl2 as my docker desktop replacement _mostly_ painlessly since the news of docker desktop's licensing changes.
- jacurtis 5y ago
  Just so people know, if you use Cockpit on Linux, You can add podman support and it essentially provides a Podman GUI. This works today, and works very well. https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-podman https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-podman
- coredog64 5y ago
  Last time I tried, podman didn’t work on M1 because of a missing upstream patch. I have been able to make Lima work directly out of Homebrew without compiling anything locally.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tiew9Vii 5y ago
  I tried Podman on OSX. It was easy to set up but the deal breaker was no bind mounts. I'm sure that functionality will come but for dev purposes it's not a Docker Desktop replacement on OSX just yet.
  - denysvitali 5y ago
    Yes exactly. I found that lima + docker are the perfect solution for me, in terms of user experience. When podman will fix this issue (with sshfs like lima does?) I'll return to it
pojntfx 5y ago
And with Linux support! Awesome!
cbushko 5y ago
I did not see it mentioned anywhere but does this have the same performance problems as Docker Desktop for Mac?
gitgud 5y ago
It says it only runs on Windows and Mac?... The top 2 platforms which run docker horribly...
- eddieroger 5y ago
  What is horrible about Docker on a Mac? I've never had a problem with it, and use it regularly as my daily driver OS for development of apps that get deployed as containers.
  - rubyist5eva 5y ago
    Not GP, but for me performance is absolutely abysmal compared to just using podman in opensuse microos virtual machine (what I'm using now instead of docker).
- shagie 5y ago
  I would urge you to compare this to Docker Desktop - https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop > Docker Desktop is an application for MacOS and Windows machines for the building and sharing of containerized applications and microservices. The "desktop" part of each refers to "systems other than linux." You can run rancher on a linux machine just as you can run docker on a linux machine - without the "desktop" part of it. As I understand it, the "desktop" nature of it is the glue between running a virtual machine on a non-linux system and the underlying virtual magic.
dpcx 5y ago
Recently we've been suggested to stop using Docker, so I've been on the lookout for alternatives. One of the biggest problems we have is that some of our in-house tooling is written with Windows as an afterthought, and so it's often easier to run things under WSL, then through Docker. But the double abstraction makes some of our apps extremely slow on those Windows machines. Does anyone know if something like Rancher/K3s is any better with this regard?
- resonious 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure Docker on Windows is going to run in a VM no matter what. And it's worth noting that running on Docker does not have any significant performance difference to running on raw Linux in the same environment. Hate to be "that guy" but if you want speed in a Linux environment then just run Linux ;). If you're really stuck with Windows and need Docker, I'd say try hyper-v, VMware, etc and see which is fastest.
- nickjj 5y ago
  > But the double abstraction makes some of our apps extremely slow on those Windows machines. If you keep your files in WSL 2's file system Docker is extremely fast. It's nearly as fast as native Linux and even apps with thousands of files will reload web servers nearly instantly on file change using volumes.
  - dpcx 5y ago
    Unless there's a way to share the files from Windows in to WSL, then I can't do that. We need to be able to edit the files from within Windows (people want their VSCode/Sublime Text/Notepad++). I've tried to tell them to get Linux machines or Mac's, but that doesn't work for everyone either.
    - woogley 5y ago
      For the VSCode situation, there is a Remote extension by Microsoft for editing files that live on the WSL2 side. For everything else you can just use the network mount to WSL2. So the performance hit will be on the editor I/O side but not the application runtime.
l30n4da5 5y ago
Unfortunately, without Windows Container support, I can't consider this full a replacement for Docker Desktop.
JeremyNT 5y ago
What's new is that their new preview release adds Linux support[0] as a "preview". This still isn't mentioned on the main site linked above nor in the main github README yet :) [0] https://community.suse.com/posts/rancher-desktop-v06-including-linux-tech-preview https://community.suse.com/posts/rancher-desktop-v06-includi...
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I immediately got a good impression of their service because their home page loads so fast. I'm a simple man.
wejick 5y ago
Whatever Docker thought when changing the license and pricing of docker desktop, they're not considering long enough about the impact of the alternative. It's just about time for the same or better quality replacement to come. At the end, docker relevance in developer machine will be less and less overtime.
- johnebgd 5y ago
  Agreed. They should have just sold ads for the unpaid edition users to tolerate.
  - bootlooped 5y ago
    Where would the ads be displayed? I almost never open the Docker Desktop application itself. It starts up automatically and mostly does what it's supposed to do. I connect to it through the command line.
  - xanaxagoras 5y ago
    Would have been the same move in my book, I wouldn't have tolerated that.
nweiler 5y ago
Is this related to Rancher, make of the k8s mgmt platform by the same name? I don't see any reference to it on their official website.
- jacurtis 5y ago
  Yes, it is the same company. Which is now part of SUSE. From the footer: > © 2021 SUSE. Rancher Desktop is an open source project of the SUSE Rancher Engineering group It is strange that they don't make it super clear. But it is briefly mentioned in the top video on the hero section of the page.
- mcdevilkiller 5y ago
  There's this on the bottom >© 2021 SUSE. Rancher Desktop is an open source project of the SUSE Rancher Engineering group.
1MachineElf 5y ago
If you want to install the Windows release[0] silently in a script, then use this (where X.Y.Z is the version number): .\Rancher.Desktop.Setup.X.Y.Z.exe /S --force-run --allusers It took me an hour to figure out the necessary arguments until I learned about some Electron-specific behavior in the installer[1]. [0] https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/releases https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/releases [1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/66906851 https://stackoverflow.com/a/66906851
- 1MachineElf 5y ago
  * I had this wrong. It's just: Rancher.Desktop.Setup.0.6.0.exe /S The --force-run option you specifically don't want for a silent install. Also, the --allusers option doesn't work.
theprestigecity 5y ago
rancher is a good platform. https://www.theprestigecity.gen.in/ https://www.theprestigecity.gen.in/
- godrejanandablr 5y ago
  thanks for sharing. https://www.godrej-ananda.net.in/ https://www.godrej-ananda.net.in/
otterley 5y ago
According to the very sparse docs, M1 Mac support is planned but not yet implemented.
Aeolun 5y ago
It has an autoplaying video on the front page?
- chimen 5y ago
  Some people are actively looking to be offended.
  - justbaker 5y ago
    I just don’t want autoplaying media. Did I ask for this? No
    - seanhunter 5y ago
      Set your browser to not autoplay videos if you don't like them. THen you never have to see them.
    - sureglymop 5y ago
      So? Just turn that off in your browser settings.
    - nine_k 5y ago
      A more reliable way is to tell your browser to never start autoplaying videos.
jrm4 5y ago
Let me say it; I love to see it. There's just something that strikes me as harmfully greedy about the idea of "Docker, a gajillion dollar company." There's just no way that THAT kind of service could be tweaked to return that much to stakeholders without seriously screwing up the experience for people who need it to just work.
- nicce 5y ago
  They have failed to monetize one of the most important products on the web development. They have never provided profits. I don’t know about the greedy part, it is more about survival at this point. That is capitalism.
  - code_biologist 5y ago
    Both of you are 100% right. Will be interesting to see how this seemingly no-win scenario plays out for the ecosystem and toolchain, beyond just the Docker products.
  - edoceo 5y ago
    They block you from even registering your username unless you pay $25k to be in the "verified" program. I'm mad they hold my name hostage, and I'm not ready to spend $25k
    - nicce 5y ago
      What do you mean with ”hostage”?
      - edoceo 5y ago
        I mean my name isn't open (on Hub there is no user/edoceo page, but one cannot register that name either. And they say they respect trademark and to open a ticket, no response. But, I can join the verified publisher for only $25,000 USD. Not literally hostage but still feels dirty to me.
hpaavola 5y ago
Does it support volume mounts from Windows and macOS to containers?
- astrostl 5y ago
  > nerdctl run -it --rm -v "${HOME}:/mnt" ubuntu ^^ volume mounts appear to "just work" on macOS
xyst 5y ago
what happened to podman
- up_o 5y ago
  Been using it on wsl2 with Ubuntu 21.04
rtpg 5y ago
I've seen a couple projects around this, are any of them also tackling the docker-compose-based workflows as well? Or will that stuff work transparently with these replacements as well?
- jhot 5y ago
  Haven't tried this yet but it mentions using nerdctl which does support compose.
tbronchain 5y ago
Really nice to see a bit of competition in here! Slightly unrelated but also, from the same company, Rancher (their main product) has been really good to deploy bare meal Kubernetes setup [almost] 100% container based.
alwaysanon 5y ago
I talked about this in a recent blog post on transitioning away from Docker Desktop - https://jason-umiker.medium.com/replacing-docker-desktop-with-wsl2-and-or-rancher-desktop-on-windows-5e036f9dc3a4 https://jason-umiker.medium.com/replacing-docker-desktop-wit...
sandGorgon 5y ago
What is the WSL2 integration story here ? That's one of the most important usecases on windows going forward.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  As mentioned in the linked page: "Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 is leveraged for Windows systems. All you need to do is download and run the application." The graphic under that quote shows containerd and k3s running under WSL2 talking to Rancher desktop.
  - sandGorgon 5y ago
    ah cool. i didnt understand the language. oops.
neximo64 5y ago
No update nags!
softveda 5y ago
It seems to be a kubernetes replacement that comes with Docker Desktop. But what are the steps to just build and run a simple Dockerfile? An example would have been good.
- hnbad 5y ago
  The video demonstrates it, using the "nerdctl" CLI which seems to be API equivalent to the docker CLI but understands k8s namespaces (thus hiding the k8s containers by default). I agree that having an example in writing would have been helpful.
  - GordonS 5y ago
    Any idea if nerdctl can run Compose services and Swarm stacks?
    - regularfry 5y ago
      Nerdctl claims to be able to run `docker-compose.yml` files as a drop-in replacement. How true that is (and how volume mounts work, if at all) I don't know.
    - hnbad 5y ago
      The video doesn't demonstrate that and instead pivots to talking about k8s. I don't know.
xpressvideoz 5y ago
I was amazed by the news at first, but seeing it again, it doesn't seem to be a direct replacement of Docker Desktop. It makes use of K3s under the hood, which is lighter than a full-blown Kubernetes, but still quite heavy. My nearly empty K3s cluster is consistently consuming ~10% CPU time on my local machine. This is not acceptable to me, so a proper replacement of Docker Desktop should be more lightweight.
- rvdmei 5y ago
  It also comes with nerdctl (docker compatible cli). It interacts with containerd directly and is a drop-in replacement for docker cli.
  - xpressvideoz 5y ago
    Oh that's nice, would it be possible to run containerd only, without running any Kubernetes controllers? I suspect the controllers are the root cause of the huge resource consumption, because they are constantly checking for the system components and trying to reconcile them.
    - chucky_z 5y ago
      Yep! If you’re on MacOS check out Lima, it’s a project by Akihiro Suda who is one of the main contributors to nerdctl (and the original author iirc)
      - rvdmei 5y ago
        Rancher Desktop macOS version is based on Lima.
- GordonS 5y ago
  Ach, the title seems to be mis-selling it. Docker Desktop is all about Docker, Compose and Swarm, and has Kubernetes functionality built on top as an extra. Rancher Desktop seems to be all about Kubernetes - can it even run standalone Docker containers, or Compose/Swarm services? EDIT: answering my own question - I checked the nerdctl GitHub page, and it states that not only is Swarm not supported, but it will not be. So Rancher Desktop is unfortunately not a drop-in Docker Desktop replacement for everyone :(
dt3ft 5y ago
For those wondering what the difference between k3s and k8s is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmLna7tHDRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmLna7tHDRc
theprestigec 5y ago
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nsonha 5y ago
why do I keep seeing the promotion of tools that require QEMU to run like it's no problem?
- callahad 5y ago
  What's wrong with requiring qemu?
  - nsonha 5y ago
    It emulates the entire hardware stack so it's even slower than virtual machines which in turn are slower than docker on linux.
    - regularfry 5y ago
      Only if it's rather oddly configured. It can emulate the entire stack, but it doesn't have to as long as your guest and host architectures match.
      - nsonha 5y ago
        Isn't that KVM? Why don't they say they use KVM if it's the case?
        detaro 5y ago
        Because they use QEMU, which in turn uses KVM where appropriate, or some Microsoft thing on Windows, or an Intel equivalent on Intel-Macs. EDIT: and since this app is for now only for Mac and Windows if I read the page right, it's probably not using KVM obviously.
- hnbad 5y ago
  Do you have licensing concerns? Because they at least claim the tool works fine on macOS and WSL2, so I don't see an obvious technical issue.
fithisux 5y ago
Moved to docker in Virtualbox for my manual / integration testing on Mac and never looked back. Now I'm looking at minikube. Not very convenient, but not a show - stopper.
leighmcculloch 5y ago
Rancher's, and Podman's, efforts on Mac are exciting, but you can also just run the Docker daemon in a VM on Mac and install the free docker CLI using homebrew. This is what I do using Canonical's Multipass to create the VM. I wrote a simple script that makes it a simple `dockerhost create`. https://github.com/leighmcculloch/dockerhost https://github.com/leighmcculloch/dockerhost
- mwaitjmp 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Does this also support volumes and setup port mapping for local host?
  - leighmcculloch 5y ago
    No port mapping, the ports are available on the IP of the VM. Volume mounts are supported by multipass, but dockerhost doesn't set them up automatically, yet!
KronisLV 5y ago
Dropping by to express healthy interest in this project. Rancher have a pretty good track record so far: - the Rancher platform itself (https://rancher.com/) is a really powerful and user friendly way to manage container clusters of all sorts, giving you a self-hosted dashboard for both your cloud and on prem clusters, for a variety of Kubernetes distributions; you can even manage the available drivers and also create deployments graphically - the K3s distribution (https://k3s.io/) is in my eyes one of the best ways to run Kubernetes yourself, both in development environments and production ones. I benchmarked K3s alongside Docker Swarm as a part of my Master's thesis and it was surprising to see that its overhead was actually very close to that of Docker Swarm (a more lightweight orchestrator that's included with Docker and uses the Docker Compose format), only exceeding it by a few hundred MB with similar deployments being active, making K3s passable for small nodes As for this particular project, it's very positive to see that it supports all of the big OSes, even though the 0.6.0 version tag would still advise caution for a while, even though it can definitely be considered as a replacement for Docker Desktop. Admittedly, it's also nice to see that Docker and the ecosystem around it is still supported and is alive and kicking, since for many projects out there it's a perfectly serviceable stack with tools that a lot of people will be familiar with, as opposed to having to migrate to podman, while it's still becoming more and more stable, yet isn't quite there yet. Now, that may be a controversial take, and Docker Inc also have their fair share of challenges, about which there was a very nice writeup here: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3632142/how-docker-broke-in-half.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3632142/how-docker-broke-i...
- rightbyte 5y ago
  > Admittedly, it's also nice to see that Docker and the ecosystem around it is still supported and is alive and kicking When the controlling organization is starting to go down the user hostile route (e.g. payed update opt-outs), it is more or less sad to see that the Docker is alive and kicking. Developers should ran away as fast as possible.
  - elzbardico 5y ago
    I see it as a legitimate way to pay programmers. You still have the core functionality, but the kind of features that the enterprise likes is paid and supports the development of open source. Why should everyone work for free to enrich the Kleiner Perkins of the world?
pjmlp 5y ago
> Rancher Desktop is an electron based application.... Oh, well. I guess they copied everything that was "good" then.
nhoughto 5y ago
Good to see people stepping in after the docker desktop change, things I care about: - transparent networking, i want to access kube services on 127.0.0.1, i'd rather not run a proxy/manage things myself - access to containerd socket to use non-rancher tooling, for image building etc. early days for this project, i'll have to spin it up and see how it goes!
throwaway10122 5y ago
One main use for Docker we have is running integration tests on local docker compose containers and/or using testcontainers library Can rancher solve this usecase?
- shelajev 5y ago
  I don't think it runs Docker. You can run minikube and use it for Docker workloads, which should work with testcontainers. https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/commands/docker-env/ https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/commands/docker-env/
varispeed 5y ago
I wish Rancher didn't adopt Kubernetes. Their Cattle was perfect for running distributed services on bare metal. It was simple and just worked. After the move to k8s I couldn't get anything to work and it was flaky. I am still running some projects on Cattle and they have few years uptime.
- V99 5y ago
  (Early employee) We liked 1.x/cattle as much as the next person but it was clear 4 years ago that k8s was going to win the mind-share & market. Competing with that was a slow and painful path to irrelevance. Which was the path Mesos chose, along with Docker/Swarm to a large degree. (Please stop running 1.x, especially if exposed to the internet; it hasn't been updated in ~3 years now and everything up and down the entire stack it supports are going to be full of CVEs.)
TeeWEE 5y ago
At my current company we started moving our setup to k8s... And using docker-compose required another deployment platform. So end 2019 we started using k3s... But developers complained about heavy resource usage, and slow startup time. So in the end we moved back to docker-compose... This means our local dev environments are NOT the same as our k8s prod clusters. But if this works well, and k3s is more lean. It could unify our infra stack across developer machines, to production. Same tooling everywhere... Love it
- midrus 5y ago
  From my experience, trying to boot up the entire platform on developer's laptops (or remote cloud servers) for each developer is something doomed to fail and cause pain, whatever you use. My best experience so far, has been to start services individually, and work with mocks and tests. And do integration on a shared staging environment or, even better, have a way to deploy multiple versions to the same env (like you can do with App Engine, Vercel, etc). I hope I never ever again have to work at a place where I need to replicate the entire platform for my development environment.
- pqb 5y ago
  Recently, I found Tilt [0] to be a good partner of mine to run "all services locally". It can be compared to "webpack for backend" (live-reloading, a lot of configuration possibilities [1]). Tilt uses Titlfiles for configuration, which are written Pythonish Starlark language and you use them to write any specific logic there. You want to run a bunch of services directly? Use local_resource()/local(). You have Procfile? There is procfile() function. You have a docker-compose.yml with services like databases? You can run it too with docker_compose(). You want to separate your Tiltfile on multiple files and include them all-together on tilt-up command? There is load()/load_dynamic(). You need some web-ui for frontend devs and a nice log browser? It is there too. You want to update your local cluster with newly built image on file save? No problem, tilt will do that with k8s_yaml() function. You need to do some extra steps before running a service (e.g. data seeding)? Use aforementioned local()/local_resource(). You need a sample project that uses tilt? Sure, there is some tutorial for C# [2]. Do you use jib instead of docker-build? Here it is [3]. Also, I am not very lucky in having resemble 1:1 k8s cluster locally. You could be close, but as long as you run in the cloud you will have different configuration on local (additional annotations, various quirks that do not exist in kind/k3s but they are on GCP). However, making dedicated dev environments in the cloud might be very costly and incur a lot of additional tinkering. [0]: https://tilt.dev/ https://tilt.dev/ [1]: https://docs.tilt.dev/api.html https://docs.tilt.dev/api.html [2]: https://docs.tilt.dev/example_csharp.html https://docs.tilt.dev/example_csharp.html [3]: https://github.com/tilt-dev/tilt-example-java/blob/master/101-jib/Tiltfile https://github.com/tilt-dev/tilt-example-java/blob/master/10...
passwert 5y ago
A bit off topic, but does anyone know what tool the author uses to display the stats at the top of the terminal?
- jm547ster 5y ago
  It's the iTerm2 built-in status bar: https://iterm2.com/3.3/documentation-status-bar.html https://iterm2.com/3.3/documentation-status-bar.html
  - passwert 5y ago
    Oh, I missed this feature. Thank you very much!
k__ 5y ago
Half-OT: I saw many "run Linux in the browser" projects. Does anyone know if there is a project to run a container on WASM?
chrisweekly 5y ago
There was a recent HN post about minikube as a drop-in relacement for Docker Desktop. FWIW I spent some hours digging into minikube and learned a bunch but hit a wall with some networking stuff and tabled it. Stoked to give Rancher Desktop a try, bc even tho Docker Desktop serves my needs for now, it is a resource hog and I'd be stoked for a good alternative.
- crucialfelix 5y ago
  I actually just switched from k3d back to minikube the other day. Both are great, but have some little problems that block me for hours. They are both moving in the right direction though. k3d/k3s starts up fast and feels minimal. I still have problems building docker images and pushing them into the cluster. Minikube solves this well: ``` minikube image build . -t localhost:5000/myapp:latest minikube image push localhost:5000/myapp:latest ``` I will be very happy when one of these runs locally without com.docker.hyperkit running 70% CPU even while idle.

judge2020 5y ago

Podman also has a docker desktop alternative in the works (Already works on Mac IIRC)[0]. Will be interesting to see how these two solutions play out. 0: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/11494 https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/11494

up_o 5y ago
I've been using podman on wsl2 as my docker desktop replacement _mostly_ painlessly since the news of docker desktop's licensing changes.
jacurtis 5y ago
Just so people know, if you use Cockpit on Linux, You can add podman support and it essentially provides a Podman GUI. This works today, and works very well. https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-podman https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-podman
coredog64 5y ago
Last time I tried, podman didn’t work on M1 because of a missing upstream patch. I have been able to make Lima work directly out of Homebrew without compiling anything locally.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tiew9Vii 5y ago
I tried Podman on OSX. It was easy to set up but the deal breaker was no bind mounts. I'm sure that functionality will come but for dev purposes it's not a Docker Desktop replacement on OSX just yet.
- denysvitali 5y ago
  Yes exactly. I found that lima + docker are the perfect solution for me, in terms of user experience. When podman will fix this issue (with sshfs like lima does?) I'll return to it

pojntfx 5y ago

And with Linux support! Awesome!

cbushko 5y ago

I did not see it mentioned anywhere but does this have the same performance problems as Docker Desktop for Mac?

gitgud 5y ago

It says it only runs on Windows and Mac?... The top 2 platforms which run docker horribly...

eddieroger 5y ago
What is horrible about Docker on a Mac? I've never had a problem with it, and use it regularly as my daily driver OS for development of apps that get deployed as containers.
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  Not GP, but for me performance is absolutely abysmal compared to just using podman in opensuse microos virtual machine (what I'm using now instead of docker).
shagie 5y ago
I would urge you to compare this to Docker Desktop - https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop > Docker Desktop is an application for MacOS and Windows machines for the building and sharing of containerized applications and microservices. The "desktop" part of each refers to "systems other than linux." You can run rancher on a linux machine just as you can run docker on a linux machine - without the "desktop" part of it. As I understand it, the "desktop" nature of it is the glue between running a virtual machine on a non-linux system and the underlying virtual magic.

dpcx 5y ago

Recently we've been suggested to stop using Docker, so I've been on the lookout for alternatives. One of the biggest problems we have is that some of our in-house tooling is written with Windows as an afterthought, and so it's often easier to run things under WSL, then through Docker. But the double abstraction makes some of our apps extremely slow on those Windows machines. Does anyone know if something like Rancher/K3s is any better with this regard?

resonious 5y ago
I'm pretty sure Docker on Windows is going to run in a VM no matter what. And it's worth noting that running on Docker does not have any significant performance difference to running on raw Linux in the same environment. Hate to be "that guy" but if you want speed in a Linux environment then just run Linux ;). If you're really stuck with Windows and need Docker, I'd say try hyper-v, VMware, etc and see which is fastest.
nickjj 5y ago
> But the double abstraction makes some of our apps extremely slow on those Windows machines. If you keep your files in WSL 2's file system Docker is extremely fast. It's nearly as fast as native Linux and even apps with thousands of files will reload web servers nearly instantly on file change using volumes.
- dpcx 5y ago
  Unless there's a way to share the files from Windows in to WSL, then I can't do that. We need to be able to edit the files from within Windows (people want their VSCode/Sublime Text/Notepad++). I've tried to tell them to get Linux machines or Mac's, but that doesn't work for everyone either.
  - woogley 5y ago
    For the VSCode situation, there is a Remote extension by Microsoft for editing files that live on the WSL2 side. For everything else you can just use the network mount to WSL2. So the performance hit will be on the editor I/O side but not the application runtime.

l30n4da5 5y ago

Unfortunately, without Windows Container support, I can't consider this full a replacement for Docker Desktop.

JeremyNT 5y ago

What's new is that their new preview release adds Linux support[0] as a "preview". This still isn't mentioned on the main site linked above nor in the main github README yet :) [0] https://community.suse.com/posts/rancher-desktop-v06-including-linux-tech-preview https://community.suse.com/posts/rancher-desktop-v06-includi...

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

I immediately got a good impression of their service because their home page loads so fast. I'm a simple man.

wejick 5y ago

Whatever Docker thought when changing the license and pricing of docker desktop, they're not considering long enough about the impact of the alternative. It's just about time for the same or better quality replacement to come. At the end, docker relevance in developer machine will be less and less overtime.

johnebgd 5y ago
Agreed. They should have just sold ads for the unpaid edition users to tolerate.
- bootlooped 5y ago
  Where would the ads be displayed? I almost never open the Docker Desktop application itself. It starts up automatically and mostly does what it's supposed to do. I connect to it through the command line.
- xanaxagoras 5y ago
  Would have been the same move in my book, I wouldn't have tolerated that.

nweiler 5y ago

Is this related to Rancher, make of the k8s mgmt platform by the same name? I don't see any reference to it on their official website.

jacurtis 5y ago
Yes, it is the same company. Which is now part of SUSE. From the footer: > © 2021 SUSE. Rancher Desktop is an open source project of the SUSE Rancher Engineering group It is strange that they don't make it super clear. But it is briefly mentioned in the top video on the hero section of the page.
mcdevilkiller 5y ago
There's this on the bottom >© 2021 SUSE. Rancher Desktop is an open source project of the SUSE Rancher Engineering group.

1MachineElf 5y ago

If you want to install the Windows release[0] silently in a script, then use this (where X.Y.Z is the version number): .\Rancher.Desktop.Setup.X.Y.Z.exe /S --force-run --allusers It took me an hour to figure out the necessary arguments until I learned about some Electron-specific behavior in the installer[1]. [0] https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/releases https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/releases [1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/66906851 https://stackoverflow.com/a/66906851

1MachineElf 5y ago
* I had this wrong. It's just: Rancher.Desktop.Setup.0.6.0.exe /S The --force-run option you specifically don't want for a silent install. Also, the --allusers option doesn't work.

theprestigecity 5y ago

rancher is a good platform. https://www.theprestigecity.gen.in/ https://www.theprestigecity.gen.in/

godrejanandablr 5y ago
thanks for sharing. https://www.godrej-ananda.net.in/ https://www.godrej-ananda.net.in/

otterley 5y ago

According to the very sparse docs, M1 Mac support is planned but not yet implemented.

Aeolun 5y ago

It has an autoplaying video on the front page?

chimen 5y ago
Some people are actively looking to be offended.
- justbaker 5y ago
  I just don’t want autoplaying media. Did I ask for this? No
  - seanhunter 5y ago
    Set your browser to not autoplay videos if you don't like them. THen you never have to see them.
  - sureglymop 5y ago
    So? Just turn that off in your browser settings.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    A more reliable way is to tell your browser to never start autoplaying videos.

jrm4 5y ago

Let me say it; I love to see it. There's just something that strikes me as harmfully greedy about the idea of "Docker, a gajillion dollar company." There's just no way that THAT kind of service could be tweaked to return that much to stakeholders without seriously screwing up the experience for people who need it to just work.

nicce 5y ago
They have failed to monetize one of the most important products on the web development. They have never provided profits. I don’t know about the greedy part, it is more about survival at this point. That is capitalism.
- code_biologist 5y ago
  Both of you are 100% right. Will be interesting to see how this seemingly no-win scenario plays out for the ecosystem and toolchain, beyond just the Docker products.
- edoceo 5y ago
  They block you from even registering your username unless you pay $25k to be in the "verified" program. I'm mad they hold my name hostage, and I'm not ready to spend $25k
  - nicce 5y ago
    What do you mean with ”hostage”?
    - edoceo 5y ago
      I mean my name isn't open (on Hub there is no user/edoceo page, but one cannot register that name either. And they say they respect trademark and to open a ticket, no response. But, I can join the verified publisher for only $25,000 USD. Not literally hostage but still feels dirty to me.

hpaavola 5y ago

Does it support volume mounts from Windows and macOS to containers?

astrostl 5y ago
> nerdctl run -it --rm -v "${HOME}:/mnt" ubuntu ^^ volume mounts appear to "just work" on macOS

xyst 5y ago

what happened to podman

up_o 5y ago
Been using it on wsl2 with Ubuntu 21.04

rtpg 5y ago

I've seen a couple projects around this, are any of them also tackling the docker-compose-based workflows as well? Or will that stuff work transparently with these replacements as well?

jhot 5y ago
Haven't tried this yet but it mentions using nerdctl which does support compose.

tbronchain 5y ago

Really nice to see a bit of competition in here! Slightly unrelated but also, from the same company, Rancher (their main product) has been really good to deploy bare meal Kubernetes setup [almost] 100% container based.

alwaysanon 5y ago

I talked about this in a recent blog post on transitioning away from Docker Desktop - https://jason-umiker.medium.com/replacing-docker-desktop-with-wsl2-and-or-rancher-desktop-on-windows-5e036f9dc3a4 https://jason-umiker.medium.com/replacing-docker-desktop-wit...

sandGorgon 5y ago

What is the WSL2 integration story here ? That's one of the most important usecases on windows going forward.

Godel_unicode 5y ago
As mentioned in the linked page: "Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 is leveraged for Windows systems. All you need to do is download and run the application." The graphic under that quote shows containerd and k3s running under WSL2 talking to Rancher desktop.
- sandGorgon 5y ago
  ah cool. i didnt understand the language. oops.

neximo64 5y ago

No update nags!

softveda 5y ago

It seems to be a kubernetes replacement that comes with Docker Desktop. But what are the steps to just build and run a simple Dockerfile? An example would have been good.

hnbad 5y ago
The video demonstrates it, using the "nerdctl" CLI which seems to be API equivalent to the docker CLI but understands k8s namespaces (thus hiding the k8s containers by default). I agree that having an example in writing would have been helpful.
- GordonS 5y ago
  Any idea if nerdctl can run Compose services and Swarm stacks?
  - regularfry 5y ago
    Nerdctl claims to be able to run `docker-compose.yml` files as a drop-in replacement. How true that is (and how volume mounts work, if at all) I don't know.
  - hnbad 5y ago
    The video doesn't demonstrate that and instead pivots to talking about k8s. I don't know.

xpressvideoz 5y ago

I was amazed by the news at first, but seeing it again, it doesn't seem to be a direct replacement of Docker Desktop. It makes use of K3s under the hood, which is lighter than a full-blown Kubernetes, but still quite heavy. My nearly empty K3s cluster is consistently consuming ~10% CPU time on my local machine. This is not acceptable to me, so a proper replacement of Docker Desktop should be more lightweight.

rvdmei 5y ago
It also comes with nerdctl (docker compatible cli). It interacts with containerd directly and is a drop-in replacement for docker cli.
- xpressvideoz 5y ago
  Oh that's nice, would it be possible to run containerd only, without running any Kubernetes controllers? I suspect the controllers are the root cause of the huge resource consumption, because they are constantly checking for the system components and trying to reconcile them.
  - chucky_z 5y ago
    Yep! If you’re on MacOS check out Lima, it’s a project by Akihiro Suda who is one of the main contributors to nerdctl (and the original author iirc)
    - rvdmei 5y ago
      Rancher Desktop macOS version is based on Lima.
GordonS 5y ago
Ach, the title seems to be mis-selling it. Docker Desktop is all about Docker, Compose and Swarm, and has Kubernetes functionality built on top as an extra. Rancher Desktop seems to be all about Kubernetes - can it even run standalone Docker containers, or Compose/Swarm services? EDIT: answering my own question - I checked the nerdctl GitHub page, and it states that not only is Swarm not supported, but it will not be. So Rancher Desktop is unfortunately not a drop-in Docker Desktop replacement for everyone :(

dt3ft 5y ago

For those wondering what the difference between k3s and k8s is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmLna7tHDRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmLna7tHDRc

theprestigec 5y ago

The prestige metropolis is a mixed development township that spans over one hundred eighty acres land acreage to encompass unbiased groups for residential plots and top rate residences. https://www.prestigecity.gen.in/ https://www.prestigecity.gen.in/ https://linktr.ee/theprestigecityvilla https://linktr.ee/theprestigecityvilla https://www.folkd.com/user/theprestigecityvilla https://www.folkd.com/user/theprestigecityvilla https://issuu.com/theprestigecityvilla/docs/the_prestige_city_view https://issuu.com/theprestigecityvilla/docs/the_prestige_cit...

nsonha 5y ago

why do I keep seeing the promotion of tools that require QEMU to run like it's no problem?

callahad 5y ago
What's wrong with requiring qemu?
- nsonha 5y ago
  It emulates the entire hardware stack so it's even slower than virtual machines which in turn are slower than docker on linux.
  - regularfry 5y ago
    Only if it's rather oddly configured. It can emulate the entire stack, but it doesn't have to as long as your guest and host architectures match.
    - nsonha 5y ago
      Isn't that KVM? Why don't they say they use KVM if it's the case?
      - detaro 5y ago
        Because they use QEMU, which in turn uses KVM where appropriate, or some Microsoft thing on Windows, or an Intel equivalent on Intel-Macs. EDIT: and since this app is for now only for Mac and Windows if I read the page right, it's probably not using KVM obviously.
hnbad 5y ago
Do you have licensing concerns? Because they at least claim the tool works fine on macOS and WSL2, so I don't see an obvious technical issue.

fithisux 5y ago

Moved to docker in Virtualbox for my manual / integration testing on Mac and never looked back. Now I'm looking at minikube. Not very convenient, but not a show - stopper.

leighmcculloch 5y ago

Rancher's, and Podman's, efforts on Mac are exciting, but you can also just run the Docker daemon in a VM on Mac and install the free docker CLI using homebrew. This is what I do using Canonical's Multipass to create the VM. I wrote a simple script that makes it a simple `dockerhost create`. https://github.com/leighmcculloch/dockerhost https://github.com/leighmcculloch/dockerhost

mwaitjmp 5y ago
Thanks for sharing. Does this also support volumes and setup port mapping for local host?
- leighmcculloch 5y ago
  No port mapping, the ports are available on the IP of the VM. Volume mounts are supported by multipass, but dockerhost doesn't set them up automatically, yet!

KronisLV 5y ago

Dropping by to express healthy interest in this project. Rancher have a pretty good track record so far: - the Rancher platform itself (https://rancher.com/) is a really powerful and user friendly way to manage container clusters of all sorts, giving you a self-hosted dashboard for both your cloud and on prem clusters, for a variety of Kubernetes distributions; you can even manage the available drivers and also create deployments graphically - the K3s distribution (https://k3s.io/) is in my eyes one of the best ways to run Kubernetes yourself, both in development environments and production ones. I benchmarked K3s alongside Docker Swarm as a part of my Master's thesis and it was surprising to see that its overhead was actually very close to that of Docker Swarm (a more lightweight orchestrator that's included with Docker and uses the Docker Compose format), only exceeding it by a few hundred MB with similar deployments being active, making K3s passable for small nodes As for this particular project, it's very positive to see that it supports all of the big OSes, even though the 0.6.0 version tag would still advise caution for a while, even though it can definitely be considered as a replacement for Docker Desktop. Admittedly, it's also nice to see that Docker and the ecosystem around it is still supported and is alive and kicking, since for many projects out there it's a perfectly serviceable stack with tools that a lot of people will be familiar with, as opposed to having to migrate to podman, while it's still becoming more and more stable, yet isn't quite there yet. Now, that may be a controversial take, and Docker Inc also have their fair share of challenges, about which there was a very nice writeup here: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3632142/how-docker-broke-in-half.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3632142/how-docker-broke-i...

rightbyte 5y ago
> Admittedly, it's also nice to see that Docker and the ecosystem around it is still supported and is alive and kicking When the controlling organization is starting to go down the user hostile route (e.g. payed update opt-outs), it is more or less sad to see that the Docker is alive and kicking. Developers should ran away as fast as possible.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  I see it as a legitimate way to pay programmers. You still have the core functionality, but the kind of features that the enterprise likes is paid and supports the development of open source. Why should everyone work for free to enrich the Kleiner Perkins of the world?

pjmlp 5y ago

> Rancher Desktop is an electron based application.... Oh, well. I guess they copied everything that was "good" then.

nhoughto 5y ago

Good to see people stepping in after the docker desktop change, things I care about: - transparent networking, i want to access kube services on 127.0.0.1, i'd rather not run a proxy/manage things myself - access to containerd socket to use non-rancher tooling, for image building etc. early days for this project, i'll have to spin it up and see how it goes!

throwaway10122 5y ago

One main use for Docker we have is running integration tests on local docker compose containers and/or using testcontainers library Can rancher solve this usecase?

shelajev 5y ago
I don't think it runs Docker. You can run minikube and use it for Docker workloads, which should work with testcontainers. https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/commands/docker-env/ https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/commands/docker-env/

varispeed 5y ago

I wish Rancher didn't adopt Kubernetes. Their Cattle was perfect for running distributed services on bare metal. It was simple and just worked. After the move to k8s I couldn't get anything to work and it was flaky. I am still running some projects on Cattle and they have few years uptime.

V99 5y ago
(Early employee) We liked 1.x/cattle as much as the next person but it was clear 4 years ago that k8s was going to win the mind-share & market. Competing with that was a slow and painful path to irrelevance. Which was the path Mesos chose, along with Docker/Swarm to a large degree. (Please stop running 1.x, especially if exposed to the internet; it hasn't been updated in ~3 years now and everything up and down the entire stack it supports are going to be full of CVEs.)

TeeWEE 5y ago

At my current company we started moving our setup to k8s... And using docker-compose required another deployment platform. So end 2019 we started using k3s... But developers complained about heavy resource usage, and slow startup time. So in the end we moved back to docker-compose... This means our local dev environments are NOT the same as our k8s prod clusters. But if this works well, and k3s is more lean. It could unify our infra stack across developer machines, to production. Same tooling everywhere... Love it

midrus 5y ago
From my experience, trying to boot up the entire platform on developer's laptops (or remote cloud servers) for each developer is something doomed to fail and cause pain, whatever you use. My best experience so far, has been to start services individually, and work with mocks and tests. And do integration on a shared staging environment or, even better, have a way to deploy multiple versions to the same env (like you can do with App Engine, Vercel, etc). I hope I never ever again have to work at a place where I need to replicate the entire platform for my development environment.
pqb 5y ago
Recently, I found Tilt [0] to be a good partner of mine to run "all services locally". It can be compared to "webpack for backend" (live-reloading, a lot of configuration possibilities [1]). Tilt uses Titlfiles for configuration, which are written Pythonish Starlark language and you use them to write any specific logic there. You want to run a bunch of services directly? Use local_resource()/local(). You have Procfile? There is procfile() function. You have a docker-compose.yml with services like databases? You can run it too with docker_compose(). You want to separate your Tiltfile on multiple files and include them all-together on tilt-up command? There is load()/load_dynamic(). You need some web-ui for frontend devs and a nice log browser? It is there too. You want to update your local cluster with newly built image on file save? No problem, tilt will do that with k8s_yaml() function. You need to do some extra steps before running a service (e.g. data seeding)? Use aforementioned local()/local_resource(). You need a sample project that uses tilt? Sure, there is some tutorial for C# [2]. Do you use jib instead of docker-build? Here it is [3]. Also, I am not very lucky in having resemble 1:1 k8s cluster locally. You could be close, but as long as you run in the cloud you will have different configuration on local (additional annotations, various quirks that do not exist in kind/k3s but they are on GCP). However, making dedicated dev environments in the cloud might be very costly and incur a lot of additional tinkering. [0]: https://tilt.dev/ https://tilt.dev/ [1]: https://docs.tilt.dev/api.html https://docs.tilt.dev/api.html [2]: https://docs.tilt.dev/example_csharp.html https://docs.tilt.dev/example_csharp.html [3]: https://github.com/tilt-dev/tilt-example-java/blob/master/101-jib/Tiltfile https://github.com/tilt-dev/tilt-example-java/blob/master/10...

passwert 5y ago

A bit off topic, but does anyone know what tool the author uses to display the stats at the top of the terminal?

jm547ster 5y ago
It's the iTerm2 built-in status bar: https://iterm2.com/3.3/documentation-status-bar.html https://iterm2.com/3.3/documentation-status-bar.html
- passwert 5y ago
  Oh, I missed this feature. Thank you very much!

k__ 5y ago

Half-OT: I saw many "run Linux in the browser" projects. Does anyone know if there is a project to run a container on WASM?

chrisweekly 5y ago

There was a recent HN post about minikube as a drop-in relacement for Docker Desktop. FWIW I spent some hours digging into minikube and learned a bunch but hit a wall with some networking stuff and tabled it. Stoked to give Rancher Desktop a try, bc even tho Docker Desktop serves my needs for now, it is a resource hog and I'd be stoked for a good alternative.

crucialfelix 5y ago
I actually just switched from k3d back to minikube the other day. Both are great, but have some little problems that block me for hours. They are both moving in the right direction though. k3d/k3s starts up fast and feels minimal. I still have problems building docker images and pushing them into the cluster. Minikube solves this well: ``` minikube image build . -t localhost:5000/myapp:latest minikube image push localhost:5000/myapp:latest ``` I will be very happy when one of these runs locally without com.docker.hyperkit running 70% CPU even while idle.