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The fact how simple it is to re-implement a large part of Docker because all it fundamentally is a bit of glue code to the kernel is the biggest problem Docker-

The fact how simple it is to re-implement a large part of Docker because all it fundamentally is a bit of glue code to the kernel is the biggest problem Docker-the-company faced and still faces. Where Docker adds real value is not (just) Docker Hub but Docker for Windows and Mac. The integrations offer a vastly superior experience than messing around with VirtualBox and Vagrant by hand (been there, done that) to achieve running Docker on one's development machine.

seabrookmx 2y ago
Rancher desktop is also a viable option and free. Many including my work moved to it after Docker's new licensing kicked in. IMO the real magic of Docker was the Docker/OCI image format. It's a brilliant way to perform caching and distribute container images, and it's really what still differentiates the workflow from "full" VM's.
- jml78 2y ago
  My main dev machine is Linux so I use Rancher Desktop but I also have a MacBook Pro m1 machine. Orbstack is so much better than rancher and docker desktop. I know they are a small company but hell if their product isn’t significantly more efficient and better.
  - throwaway817472 2y ago
    Completely agree. I moved from docker desktop to rancher after an update blew away my kubernetes cluster, and then from Rancher to Orbstack due to a number of bugs that were crashing the underlying VM. Orbstack has been rock solid (aside from one annoying networking issue), and it uses significantly less battery. They’ve done a fantastic job.
    - jml78 2y ago
      Only complaint is that my home network assigns IPv6 addresses and that fucks up external dns lookups for pods in Orbstack.
  - fl0id 2y ago
    Podman-Desktop is also great b/c it now has gpu support on macOS (for the Linux container)
    - moogly 2y ago
      I could not get LocalStack to run on Podman (w/ Docker emulation), on Fedora, so had to go back to Docker.
  - kdrag0n 2y ago
    Love to hear that :) sent you an email about the k8s IPv6 issue — should be able to get it fixed in OrbStack
  - seabrookmx 2y ago
    Why not use Docker CE if you're on Linux?
- tryauuum 2y ago
  Related to image format, has anyone tried to use alternative image formats? There was a differnt format / filesystem for containers to leverage deduplication between different images (so the node won't need to fetch yet another copy of cuda / pytorch)
  - fire_lake 2y ago
    This is common in the Bazel community.
aryonoco 2y ago
Docker for Windows and Mac are both bloated pieces of software, outperformed by Rancher Desktop and Orbstack. Docker's only real innovation was the OCI format, which it had to give away for it to become an industry standard, and now doesn't own.
- hu3 2y ago
  Docker on Windows can use WSL2 engine for near native performance.
maxloh 2y ago
But Rancher Desktop does the same too (and is also open source).
magic_hamster 2y ago
Docker Desktop on Mac is a handicapped, underprivileged mess. Docker cli for Mac with Colima is still underprivileged, but at least you can skip the bs license and Docker's gui. On Windows you can at least use Docker on WSL which works great. Why use Docker Desktop is beyond me.
- skissane 2y ago
  > Why use Docker Desktop is beyond me. I lived through a failed attempt to migrate from Docker Desktop for Mac to an open source alternative (minikube+portainer, IIRC). A lot of test scripts developers relied on – to run parts of the integration test suite on their laptops for debugging – broke, because Docker Desktop for Mac went to a lot of effort to make macOS look like you were running Docker on Linux, whereas the open source replacement wasn't as seamless. Some of these test scripts contained Java code directly talking to the Docker daemon over its Unix domain socket, so need the same API implemented. Many other scripts made heavy use of the Docker CLI. After spending a lot of time on it, it was decided to just go back to Docker Desktop for Mac. The failed migration had resulted in highly paid engineers spending time pulling their hair out trying to get test scripts to work instead of actually fixing bugs and delivering new features. Now, that was 2+ years ago now, and maybe the open source alternatives have caught up since, or maybe we picked the wrong one or made some other mistake. But I'm not rushing to try it again.
  - nucleardog 2y ago
    The reason Docker Desktop for Mac looks like you're running Docker on Linux is because... you are. It's running docker in a linux VM for you. Similar issues in our environment, and I managed to swap everything over to Rancher Desktop fairly seamlessly as it does the exact same thing. It runs a Linux VM and if you select the "dockerd (moby)" container engine it runs a copy of docker inside of it. So you get a socket with the same docker API implemented... because it's running actual docker. docker compose and everything else work as expected. The reason we switched is that Rancher Desktop, along with providing a convenient way to run docker, also includes a full k3s install in that same VM. So we can work on unifying some of our stack/configs on kubernetes rather than docker for local and kubernetes for everywhere else. It also opens up using upstream helm charts and things when a developer wants to deploy and try something locally. It's also free. Open source and backed by SUSE, who also develops and maintains the k3s distribution among other stuff in this space.
acedTrex 2y ago
I just use colima on macos, its a far better experience. Much lighter weight
airstrike 2y ago
Docker for Mac is just unusable. They're not really adding any value there.
- SadTrombone 2y ago
  Have you tried out Orbstack?
  - Bnjoroge 2y ago
    +1 on orbstack. near-perfect drop in
dilyevsky 2y ago
Nah, they should have prioritized building some sort of PaaS solution like CloudRun, Render or Fly so they can sell that to enterprises for $$$. Instead they did half-baked docker swarm which never really worked reliably and then lost ground to k8s rapidly
- jen20 2y ago
  Didn’t they buy at least one of these? It was garbage, and no one cared.
  - dilyevsky 2y ago
    dotCloud was actually what Docker came out of. No one cared because they didn’t prioritize it enough to make it good
    - jen20 2y ago
      Orchard was the one I was thinking of.
- smt88 2y ago
  Docker was a spinoff of an internal tool used to build exactly the type of PaaS you're describing. It was like a better Heroku and I loved it, but they shut it down when they focused on commercializing Docker itself.
  - rudasn 2y ago
    dot cloud yes? I was surprised when they shut that down too.
  - dilyevsky 2y ago
    That was always weird to me they opted for freemium cli instead of enterprise paas play. Maybe it was just too early
    - 2y ago
exceptione 2y ago
I think Docker is really lucky that devs still think container=Docker. Podman is in many aspects superior, while still being able to function as a drop in.
djmips 2y ago
A lot of popular wealthy systems are 'easy' to re-implement. I thought the value was in Docker images? Or is that not how Docker is used? The only way I've used it is to be able to import someone's virtual build setup so I could build something from years ago.

seabrookmx 2y ago

Rancher desktop is also a viable option and free. Many including my work moved to it after Docker's new licensing kicked in. IMO the real magic of Docker was the Docker/OCI image format. It's a brilliant way to perform caching and distribute container images, and it's really what still differentiates the workflow from "full" VM's.

jml78 2y ago
My main dev machine is Linux so I use Rancher Desktop but I also have a MacBook Pro m1 machine. Orbstack is so much better than rancher and docker desktop. I know they are a small company but hell if their product isn’t significantly more efficient and better.
- throwaway817472 2y ago
  Completely agree. I moved from docker desktop to rancher after an update blew away my kubernetes cluster, and then from Rancher to Orbstack due to a number of bugs that were crashing the underlying VM. Orbstack has been rock solid (aside from one annoying networking issue), and it uses significantly less battery. They’ve done a fantastic job.
  - jml78 2y ago
    Only complaint is that my home network assigns IPv6 addresses and that fucks up external dns lookups for pods in Orbstack.
- fl0id 2y ago
  Podman-Desktop is also great b/c it now has gpu support on macOS (for the Linux container)
  - moogly 2y ago
    I could not get LocalStack to run on Podman (w/ Docker emulation), on Fedora, so had to go back to Docker.
- kdrag0n 2y ago
  Love to hear that :) sent you an email about the k8s IPv6 issue — should be able to get it fixed in OrbStack
- seabrookmx 2y ago
  Why not use Docker CE if you're on Linux?
tryauuum 2y ago
Related to image format, has anyone tried to use alternative image formats? There was a differnt format / filesystem for containers to leverage deduplication between different images (so the node won't need to fetch yet another copy of cuda / pytorch)
- fire_lake 2y ago
  This is common in the Bazel community.

aryonoco 2y ago

Docker for Windows and Mac are both bloated pieces of software, outperformed by Rancher Desktop and Orbstack. Docker's only real innovation was the OCI format, which it had to give away for it to become an industry standard, and now doesn't own.

hu3 2y ago
Docker on Windows can use WSL2 engine for near native performance.

maxloh 2y ago

But Rancher Desktop does the same too (and is also open source).

magic_hamster 2y ago

Docker Desktop on Mac is a handicapped, underprivileged mess. Docker cli for Mac with Colima is still underprivileged, but at least you can skip the bs license and Docker's gui. On Windows you can at least use Docker on WSL which works great. Why use Docker Desktop is beyond me.

skissane 2y ago
> Why use Docker Desktop is beyond me. I lived through a failed attempt to migrate from Docker Desktop for Mac to an open source alternative (minikube+portainer, IIRC). A lot of test scripts developers relied on – to run parts of the integration test suite on their laptops for debugging – broke, because Docker Desktop for Mac went to a lot of effort to make macOS look like you were running Docker on Linux, whereas the open source replacement wasn't as seamless. Some of these test scripts contained Java code directly talking to the Docker daemon over its Unix domain socket, so need the same API implemented. Many other scripts made heavy use of the Docker CLI. After spending a lot of time on it, it was decided to just go back to Docker Desktop for Mac. The failed migration had resulted in highly paid engineers spending time pulling their hair out trying to get test scripts to work instead of actually fixing bugs and delivering new features. Now, that was 2+ years ago now, and maybe the open source alternatives have caught up since, or maybe we picked the wrong one or made some other mistake. But I'm not rushing to try it again.
- nucleardog 2y ago
  The reason Docker Desktop for Mac looks like you're running Docker on Linux is because... you are. It's running docker in a linux VM for you. Similar issues in our environment, and I managed to swap everything over to Rancher Desktop fairly seamlessly as it does the exact same thing. It runs a Linux VM and if you select the "dockerd (moby)" container engine it runs a copy of docker inside of it. So you get a socket with the same docker API implemented... because it's running actual docker. docker compose and everything else work as expected. The reason we switched is that Rancher Desktop, along with providing a convenient way to run docker, also includes a full k3s install in that same VM. So we can work on unifying some of our stack/configs on kubernetes rather than docker for local and kubernetes for everywhere else. It also opens up using upstream helm charts and things when a developer wants to deploy and try something locally. It's also free. Open source and backed by SUSE, who also develops and maintains the k3s distribution among other stuff in this space.

acedTrex 2y ago

I just use colima on macos, its a far better experience. Much lighter weight

airstrike 2y ago

Docker for Mac is just unusable. They're not really adding any value there.

SadTrombone 2y ago
Have you tried out Orbstack?
- Bnjoroge 2y ago
  +1 on orbstack. near-perfect drop in

dilyevsky 2y ago

Nah, they should have prioritized building some sort of PaaS solution like CloudRun, Render or Fly so they can sell that to enterprises for $$$. Instead they did half-baked docker swarm which never really worked reliably and then lost ground to k8s rapidly

jen20 2y ago
Didn’t they buy at least one of these? It was garbage, and no one cared.
- dilyevsky 2y ago
  dotCloud was actually what Docker came out of. No one cared because they didn’t prioritize it enough to make it good
  - jen20 2y ago
    Orchard was the one I was thinking of.
smt88 2y ago
Docker was a spinoff of an internal tool used to build exactly the type of PaaS you're describing. It was like a better Heroku and I loved it, but they shut it down when they focused on commercializing Docker itself.
- rudasn 2y ago
  dot cloud yes? I was surprised when they shut that down too.
- dilyevsky 2y ago
  That was always weird to me they opted for freemium cli instead of enterprise paas play. Maybe it was just too early
  - 2y ago

exceptione 2y ago

I think Docker is really lucky that devs still think container=Docker. Podman is in many aspects superior, while still being able to function as a drop in.

djmips 2y ago

A lot of popular wealthy systems are 'easy' to re-implement. I thought the value was in Docker images? Or is that not how Docker is used? The only way I've used it is to be able to import someone's virtual build setup so I could build something from years ago.