What are better alternatives to Docker desktop on Windows?
I am using Rancher desktop and number of bugs and lack of features would make paying for Docker desktop worthwhile if I used it more than ~1 hour per week.
This is a weird question: why would you use anything like Docker Desktop to begin with?
I didn't even know Docker Desktop existed until couple months ago. My wife works on MS Windows and she needed to run someone's project that was for some reason distributed in Docker images... She couldn't get Docker installed on Windows, but that's kind of expected as everything is kind of screwy there... so, I had to use Web search to figure out what is the way to do it (she did try to get Docker Desktop).
I ended up configuring Hyper-V (solely because it comes bundled with the system) and installing Docker in some Arch VM I set up for that.
I cannot claim that this is a "comfortable" setup, but given the overall bad UX of that OS and that Docker isn't designed to run on it from the start, I think it's an OK solution.
I briefly tried opening the Docker Desktop GUI, and I just cannot understand why would anyone need that specific thing... it just seems to make everything worse at the baseline. You immediately miss the convenience of being able to feed the output it produces into grep / pager or to combine information extracted from one output with the input into another operation.
Lol, this is exactly where I'm at. I push others to do wsl2 + podman but I'm doing Hyper-v myself just because fighting cgroup and systemd stuff was quite annoying. Further, you get some really nice space saving with the btrfs driver.
Maybe her work changed some settings in Windows? From a clean install of Windows I thought Docker Desktop installed fine for me but WSL2 needed me to change some setting.
It was definitely not a clean Windows install. She inherited this laptop from someone else, and it wasn't well "cleaned up" (some previous user settings were still there). Also, the IT had put some restrictions on how Hyper-V could be used, I think, or maybe have pre-configured it somehow (most likely unintentionally, when configuring something else).
The sort of problems it was having were related to virtualizing the network adapter. Somehow after about half an hour it would just "stop working". Since it's Windows... no debugging, no logs, and the Web search brings up a lot of nonsense when you try to figure out the problem. The kind of "stop working" was that the host could still use the adapter, but the guest system (the one running Docker) would still have an IP, knew the IP of the router... but sending anything to the outside world (i.e. the router) would end up lost.
Maybe it was a faulty adapter. Maybe faulty Windows driver, or maybe a problem in Hyper-V / its settings... I never figured it out. The same problem existed if I tried to do it with any VM I'd create there, if I tried to virtualize the adapter, so it wasn't unique to Docker. Eventually, I've given up on the idea of having a virtualized adapter, and put the VM in its own NAT'ed network.
If you don't need to access `docker` command from Windows, just install docker using the same way you would install docker on a regular Linux in WSL2. (e.g. sudo apt install docker-ce, curl https://get.docker.sh/)
Podman in wsl2 works fairly well. However, there are some rough edges that you'll have to smooth out. (Such as setting up the docker host and fighting the podman socket stuff if you need it).
I am using Rancher desktop and number of bugs and lack of features would make paying for Docker desktop worthwhile if I used it more than ~1 hour per week.