Is this the program that open source people use to install all the random depencies that their program needs to work? The one that people tell me to use when I complain about git bash pico sudo pytorch Install commands?
Or did another company copy their name?
Not having to install dependencies is a benefit of containers and their images. That’s a pretty big thing to miss. Maybe give it a closer look.
Nope. Docker doesn’t do that. That’s something else.
But it does in a lot of cases. At work, we use Docker images to bundle our dependencies for each microservice, and at home, I use Docker images for the same reason on my self-hosted repos. It’s fantastic for running servers in a sandbox so you don’t have to worry about what dependencies the host has.
But perhaps OP is talking about flatpaks instead.
I mean, they’re one implementor of about 10 that provide the same container standard. It sucks that they were first so their name is now synonymous with containers a la Kleenex, but the technology itself is standard, very open and ubiquitous, and a huge step forward in simplifying deployments that would otherwise be too complex to reasonably handle.
To be fair, I used LXC before Docker, so I’ve always called them “containers.” But I guess I’m old or something.
I’m sure “professionals” can afford $4
Our 200 developers all switched from docker desktop to rancher after Docker tried to jack up the price about a year and a half ago, along with a bunch of legal threats. Their attitude was so piss poor, we went from debating paying the higher fees to just fucking them off entirely.
I will pay $4 per user to NOT use Docker.
Hmm, I might have to do that at work. We pay for Docker, but we don’t actually use any of the features from Docker, the service. We build our images locally, and production pulls from AWS ECR, yet we all have Docker Hub licenses because my boss felt like we should be paying for it.
Docker works fine, but honestly, we don’t need it, and I have been considering eliminating Docker on my self-hosted stuff.
I love docker images, hate docker Inc.
you didn’t need anything like docker with web 1.0; you just needed cuteftp and a text editor.
Surely you mean WS_FTP LE.
Me, still using winscp for random nonsense.
How is the transition from docker to podman? I’m using two compose scripts and like 10 containers each. And portainer to comfortably restart stuff on the fly
from what I can gather its currently recommended to use quadlets to generate systemd units to achieve what compose was doing. podman compose is a thing but IIRC I didn’t find that was straight drop in and I had to change the syntax or formatting a bit for it to work and from the brief testing I have put in quadlets seems less hassle, but if you use a non systemd distro then I don’t know.
I can only provide my experience; it was a drop-in replacement. I have 7 services running and 3 db containers. I was able to migrate using the Podman official instructions without issue.
I’d say about 99% is the same.
Two notable things that were different were:
- Podman config file is different which I needed to edit where containers are stored since I have a dedicated location I want to use
- The preferred method for running Nvidia GPUs in containers is CDI, which imo is much more concise than Docker’s Nvidia GPU device setup.
The second one is also documented on the CUDA Container Toolkit site, and very easy to edit a compose file to use CDI instead.
There’s also some small differences here and there like podman asking for a preferred remote source instead of defaulting to dockerhub.
Folks, the docker runtime is open source, and not even the only one of its kind. They won’t charge for that. If they tried to make it closed source, everyone would just laugh and switch to one of several completely free alternatives. They charge for hosting images, build time on their build servers, and various “premium” developer tools you don’t need. In fact, you need none of this, you can do all of it yourself on whatever hardware you deem to be good enough. There are also many other hosted alternatives out there.
Docker thinks they have a monopoly, for some reason. If you use the technology, you are probably already aware that they don’t.
Does that include running Windows containers? It seems like the alternatives don’t support those.
Windows container runtime is free as well, simply install the docker runtime from chocolatey or winget along with the Windows Containers and Hyper-V windows features. This is what we do on some build machines for CI.
Theres no reason to use desktop other than “ease of use”
There are some reasons. Networking can get messed up, so Docker Desktop “fixed that” for you, but the dirty secret is it’s basically a Linux VM with Docker CE and some convenience network routes.
Youre talking about Linux containers on Windows, I think commenter above was referring to windows containers on Windows, which is its own special hell for lucky folks like me.
Otherwise I totally agree. Ive done both setups without docker desktop.
Does anybody actually use that feature though?
There are always lost sheep in the fields.
If they tried to close source it, someone would just fork it.
I thought docker was FOSS? What exactly are they charging you for?
Support. If your a business, you pay to keep uptime high. This is unnecessary for most people.
If you’re a business and need uptime you shouldn’t be using Docker Desktop in the first place
You would be amazed
Not amazed, just depressed.
Docker Engine (which is the core of what people think of as “Docker”) is FOSS. Docker Desktop (which most people rely on for local development) is free for individuals but I believe the license says companies over a certain size are required to pay.
And on top of that the paid plans also come with support, which large businesses frequently require, and private repositories on docker’s image repository.
I am baffled as to why people want a GUI for Docker, of all things
We use it, and I honestly don’t see much value. I use 90% CLI, but occasionally it’s nice. I use macOS at work, so it’s nice to be able to see how much space the VM is using. Also, searching through logs is a little nicer through the GUI than the CLI.
I actively avoid the GUI at home because, even on Linux, it’ll spin up a VM to host your containers, whereas if you stick with the CLI, there’s no VM, which solves soooo many headaches.
They use Windows
I think docker desktop’s bigger value prop is that it’s a well supported zero-effort setup of a VM to run the docker daemon on platforms that don’t support it natively (i.e. MacOS which a lot of programmers use). And it very cleanly handles mounting your local filesystem into containers running in the VM, which is important for dev envs and used to be a source of friction with alternatives (although it seems like the competition has caught up and this also now works out of the box with rancher desktop and others?). Having a GUI is somewhere behind those, though I know folks who have a weird preference for GUIs 🤷♀️.
I’m just a guy who uses Linux and spends most of his time in a terminal, so I’m not saying I value docker desktop, and I personally don’t have to deal with any of this so I’m probably behind on how good the alternatives are. Just saying where I see other people get use out of it.
Glad I run everything in a VM. If you want my money you can accept donations, and sell support contracts.
The moment you hide features or code behind a paywall or proprietary license, is the moment you no longer get my fucking money.
Granted random weirdos who donate to FLOSS projects probably weren’t paying dockers bill anywho.
This is the correct response.
At my job we’ve been asked to remove Docker desktop unless it is absolutely necessary for a client project.
I’ve just been using Docker through command line via WSL and that’s good enough for me.
I don’t see any use for Docker Desktop, you can see the running containers in a gui instead of just typing docker ps in a terminal, damn what a fucking awesome and needed thing, it’s gonna totally come in handy when I do deployments through the terminal and I didn’t learn the commands
Especially when your ide/editor has a plug-in that does the sane thing than docker desktop anyways
I’m in the process of learning docker, can you share what that is? That sounds very helpful.
In VSCodium you have the docker plugin. It pretty much offers the same capabilities as the Docker desktop (view containers, images, etc. Allow to connect to the containers, to see their files, etc).
That’s awesome, thanks! I use VSCodium too, will search it up the plugin later. That’ll be super useful.
Ability to pull more images from Docker Hub.
Are you sure about that? I dunno if that’s correct.
Yes, in the sense that if you are a free user or unauthenticated and pull too often (including checking if a tag exists) you will get rate limited and have to wait or pay.
Can confirm. Spent a bunch of time a few weeks ago setting up ECR pull through cache in AWS to alleviate this very issue.
Dev containers have been dead for a long time.
Docker is not only about dependency management. It also offers service “composing”, via
docker compose
, and network isolation for each service.Although I personally love Nix, and I run NixOS on some of my servers, I do not believe it can replace Docker/Podman. Unless you go the NixOS Containers route.
Interfaces,vlans and capable gateway. Except instead of the vendor lock in you have access to the gold standards of which all out scale
Maybe to the two dozen nix users. To all others dev containers are very well alive.
Lol. Its the largest and most updated repo of any but by all means, “dozen” hahaha
Oh. This is /technology. I thought pants were about to go way up in price for a second.
Glad I’m not the only one
Wait…y’all were paying for Docker?
Corp accounts, Docker Desktop isn’t free for non-personal use
That gives me an idea - managers can ask staff to learn the CLI and give them gift cards for what it would have cost to license the Docker Desktop client 🧠
Their entire offering is such a joke. I’m forced to use Docker Desktop for work, as we’re on Windows. Every time that piece of shit gets updated, it’s more useless garbage. Endless security snake oil features. Their installer even messes with your WSL home directory. They literally fuck with your AWS and Azure credentials to make it more “convenient” for you to use their cloud integrations. When they implemented that, they just deleted my AWS profile from my home directory, because they felt it should instead be a symlink to my Windows home directory. These people are not to be trusted with elevated privileges on your system. They actively abuse the privilege.
The only reason they exist is that they are holding the majority of images hostage on their registry. Their customers are similarly being held hostage, because they started to use Docker on Windows desktops and are now locked in. Nobody gives a shit about any of their benefits. Free technology and hosting was their setup, now they let everyone bleed who got caught. Prices will rise until they find their sweet spot. Thanks for the tech. Now die already.
This speaks to my soul so much. I started at a non profit 2 years ago and it pains me how much the company spends on Oracle and docker now and no one does anything about it. So much of our infrastructure is built to rely on these things that we can’t just do without them when they do crazy shit like this. And Oracle and docker can afford to do this as long as a few cash cows hang on like us. Hostage is the worst and best description.
I actually thought this headline was a joke (i.e. adding 80% of 0 to 0 equals 0), until I clicked the link to see that people actually pay for Docker? I guess this is for Enterprise?
I have never really had much use for it, so never have installed it, but it seems like everyone here uses Docker, which is surprising given the cost and what you just said.
Yeah they witch hunt you pretty bad about using docker in Enterprise
I switched to running docker inside wsl2 (installed as per their docs) and so far it’s been working well.
Podman guys… Podman All the way…
We’ve completely transitioned from podman to docker where I work. The only pain point was podman compose being immature compared to docker compose, but turns out you can run docker compose with podman using the podman socket easily.
I think you wrote it back ways: transitioned from docker to podman?
Yeah podman should use quadlets, not compose, but still works just fine with docker compose and the podman socket!
I gave podman compose a fresh try just the other day and was happy to see that it “just worked”.
I’m personally pissed about aardvark-dns, which provides DNS for podman. The version that is still in Debian Stable sets a TTL of 24h on A record responses. This caused my entire service network to be disrupted whenever a pod restarted. The default behavior for similar resolvers is to set a TTL of 0. It’s like people who maintain it take it as an opportunity to rewrite existing solutions in Rust and implement all the bugs they can. Sometimes feels like someone just thought it would be a fun summer break project to implement DNS or network security.
I don’t think you even need Docker licenses to run Linux containers, but unfortunately I need to deal with this because I have some legacy software running in windows containers.
That’s not the point. Maybe you can, but for how long? you will never stop asking the question with docker…
Oh shit, what would I do without… Scout Analysis?
Recover several hundred GB of disk space, if my team’s experience was any indication.
Don’t you mean SWOT analysis?
You SWOT m8?
Podman or Rancher Desktop
Rancher got a lot better very quickly, but I’ve never used podman and have heard mixed things about it… Might give it a whirl at some point, but I’ve been saying that to myself for years
the enshittification begins…
Begins?!? Docker Inc was waist deep in enshittification the moment they started rate limiting docker hub, which was nearly 3 or 4 years ago.
This is just another step towards the deep end. Companies that could easily move away from docker hub, did so years ago. The companies that remain struggle to leave and will continue to pay.
When that happened our DevOps teams migrated all our prod k8’s to podman, with zero issues. Docker who?
Your choice of container runtime has zero impact on the rate-limits of Docker Hub. They probably had a container image proxy already and just switched because Docker is a security nightmare and needlessly heavy.
Why would anybody use podman for k8s…containerd is the default for years.
Maybe you can run containerd with podman… I haven’t checked. I just run k3s myself.
Yeah, but you don’t need anything besides the runtime with kubernetes. Podman is completely unnecessary since kubelet does the container orchestration based on Kubernetes control plane. Running podman is like running docker, unnecessary attack surface for an API that is not used by anybody (in Kubernetes).
I run k0s at home, FWIW, tried k3s too :)
Yeah I know.
Interesting that you run k0s, hadn’t heard about it. Would you mind giving a quick review and compare it to k3s, pros and cons?
I can’t really make an exhaustive comparison. I think k3s was a little too opinionated for my taste, with lots of rancher logic in it (paths, ingress, etc.). K0s was a little more “bare”, and I had some trouble in the past with k3s with upgrading (encountered some error), while with k0s so far (about 2 years) I never had issues. k0s also has some ansible role that eases operations, I don’t know if now also k3s does. Either way, they are quite similar overall so if one is working for you, rest assured you are not missing out.
Anyone looking for a free drop in replacement, I’ve been using Rancher Desktop without any issues https://rancherdesktop.io/
I’ve been using podman desktop (https://podman-desktop.io/) which is also free. I’ve never heard of rancher desktop so I’ll have to give that a look!
I second Podman. I’ve been using it recently and find it to be pretty good!
I am getting into Podman but I cannot force my firewall to respect it for some reason.
Rancher is owned by Suse, which is mainly a solid steward in the community.
They also have k8 frontend called Harvestor. It can run VMs directly, which is nice.
Well, there is this one thing: they asked OpenSuse to drop the Suse branding…
Which is fair. Fedora never called itself red hat. CentOS never called itself red hat.
Suse is a pretty good company and deserves the right to their intellectual property and trademarks. OpenSuse shouldn’t make a big deal out of simply changing their name.
They could rename themselves to OpenSusame and keep rolling without any issues whatsoever.
Of course, but I still think it is not very smart from SUSE, since I bet many companies got into SUSE because coworkers had very good experiences with OpenSUSE.
I, at least, if my company would need corporate Linux, would recommend SUSE to my company because of that reason.
How does the image scanning compare to docker scout? (Or whatever the docket desktop one is called).
I use this as well. I haven’t had any issues.
So does this setup like a one-node kubernetes cluster on your local machine or something? I didn’t know that was possible.
Basically yes. Rancher Desktop sets up K3s in a VM and gives you a
kubectl
,docker
and a few other binaries preconfigured to talk to that VM. K3s is just a lightweight all-in-one Kubernetes distro that’s relatively easy to set up (of course, you still have to learn Kubernetes so it’s not really easy, just skips the cluster setup).Thanks for the info. For others curious, here’s a decent short intro to K3s.
Now I’m kind of wondering if this is light enough for integration tests.
For integration tests I’d go with kind instead. Use it in my work and it works perfectly in our ci/CD. https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/