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Do You Need Docker Desktop For Linux?

Volker Schukai on May 15, 2022

I read with interest Docker's announcement that Docker for Linux is coming or rather, it is already there now. // Detect dark theme var ifr...
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Peter Franken • Edited

It is a bloated, non-performant, and hostile piece of....

It has never not had major performance and stability issues, continuously tries to send telemetry data by various sneaky means (the opt-out switch is just for show), new unnecessary and mostly unremovable crap is being added with each update, it can't even handle the established DevContainer conventions... I could go on for a while.

It's not solving any real problems, but it does saddle you up with a bunch of new ones. Not a great deal.

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Volker Schukai

i didn't want to write it so drastically, but that was also my experience in the years i had used it on windows.

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Peter Franken

The latest Docker Desktop release for MacOS has been out for a couple of days now, and it's made the whole thing - including the daemon - entirely non-functional. This update brought "extensions" (aka liabilities, enabled by default of course), disabling them plays a part in the issue. People at Docker are "looking into it".

Their pricing seems fair, that is, until you start calculating in all the never-ending stream of problems they're causing, the majority being completely unnecessary and easily avoidable.

So yeah, hence my somewhat emotional response :)

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alesbe • Edited

Docker desktop made me change permanently to Linux haha, I used Windows my whole life, until I started working with Docker. To run Docker on Windows you need WSL2 and Docker Desktop, I didn't like to open it every time I wanted to run a container or just use powershell because at least for me the experience wasn't the same using WSL, also I found easier to run things like mongoDB and other server environment software directly on Linux instead of windows without using WSL (just a virtual environment of the Ubuntu terminal).

I think that Docker Desktop it's helpful to manage containers in a desktop environment, but once you get used to the terminal, you'll end up using the terminal because it's faster than opening the desktop environment and consume more time and resources, but I think that supporting desktop version for Linux users it's also a great thing, because it can reach more people! šŸ™Œ

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Volker Schukai

I can understand that. :-)

i don't know how it is now, but in the past.
docker desktop under windows always had quality problems.
relatively often after an update the daemon was no longer accessible.

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HackMEAny

Not needed

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Volker Schukai

thank you for the comment.

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Giovanni Mazzuoccolo

The only advantage that I have with docker desktop is to open a container CLI with one click, without copy-pasting the id (maybe there is a quick way to do it by command line that I do not know :) )

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Volker Schukai

do you use linux or windows? if linux what tools did you use before?

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Giovanni Mazzuoccolo

Mac and linux. On Linux I used docker and docker-compose from command line

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Anto Online

I agree and also cannot see the real value-add. No doubt some business exec had a say and said: unified blah blah all os blah enterprise. :)

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Volker Schukai

ok, i see you are not a fan of it either :-)