The thing Docker Desktop (and analogues like Podman Desktop, Rancher Desktop, etc.) is useful for (a) is setting up a Linux guest VM so that you can run Linux c

The thing Docker Desktop (and analogues like Podman Desktop, Rancher Desktop, etc.) is useful for (a) is setting up a Linux guest VM so that you can run Linux containers and (b) doing some socket forwarding magic so that when you run the `docker` CLI on the host operating system, it acts as a remote client for dockerd running on the guest. There's little point in running Docker Desktop on Linux because you don't need either (a) or (b) on Linux (nor the equivalents for Podman or your favorite Kubernetes distribution). You get the overhead and annoyances of running all your containers under a second OS running under your first one for what— an Electron GUI? I guess it's something if you're really worried about container escapes during local development. But it doesn't generally seem worth it to me. The other thing OrbStack integrates is letting you spin up many 'machines' that have fast startup and efficiently share resources with each other. But OrbStack achieves that by running long-lived system containers on a single guest VM. If you're on Linux, you can just do that directly, just like the Docker containers, using the same tools¹ OrbStack uses under the hood. The CLI for Incus (a descendant if lxd, associated with Linux containers and LXC) is really pretty nice, too. OrbStack has a lot of polish and performance optimizations that make it really competitive against other tools like it. There's lots of thoughtful touches in it beyond the basic ideas outlined above. But I wouldn't recommend any tool in its class to someone running a Linux desktop/laptop/workstation who wants to use containers in development. Just use the real things directly and learn the normal, universal CLIs. -- 1: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/ https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/