Just in time for the end of jan Docker Desktop grace period (https://www.docker.com/blog/the-grace-period-for-the-docker-...).

I played with this when first announced, and then now and all the things I wanted when i first tried it out are now fixed (mainly transparent networking..) and the option for dockerd container engine makes migrating pretty simple.

What's the state of Rancher these days? I was handing over a clients project and looking for someone to maintain it long term. I chose Rancher in my ignorance, but all Rancher did was tank the project.

They installed their own halfbaked inhouse CloudNative Storage Provider, then quoted the client 50k to try to stabilize it. Their sales people were also nonstop trying to sell them on more consulting hours on top of the 50k they were taking in license fee for a 3 node cluster.

The whole thing left such a bad taste in my mouth that whenever I see Rancher I tell my clients to look for other options and run away as far as possible.

Now that Suse owns them I'm a bit more open to it, but I imagine there are still a lot of old rancher people in there.

Can anyone enlighten me on the current state of affairs?

It feels like we're late to create the desktop experience where most things run in containers. My wish is to run something like Proxmox as a "stable base", and within it have a VM for my firewall (pfsense), my primary Linux OS (Fedora/Arch), a VM for services (Docker & k8s), and a VM for Windows gaming. I like the separation of concerns. I've wanted to do all of this on a laptop but I can't get a VM to exclusively take control of the GPU & display controller (overtake the laptop display panel).

For a long while now I've wanted a stable, slim base OS. I actually thought Rancher Desktop was a rebirth of RancherOS: https://rancher.com/docs/os/

I really liked the concept of a "system docker" and a "user docker". I thought Fedora CoreOS had potential to be the first Linux "Desktop" container distro.

Oh well, maybe a desktop distro that aims to containerize all apps is a 2023 thing. Still remember that Steam bug?

It looks like Rancher Desktop uses Lima VM (https://github.com/lima-vm/lima) under the hood, I suppose in the same way that Docker Desktop uses Hypervisor.framework on macos? This is the first I've heard about the Lima project. I'll be interested to see how file system performance with this compares to Docker Desktop on mac.

These desktop applications look nice, but personally I’m much more comfortable with CLI tools. I have no idea what my colleagues are doing that use GUI git programs. I can’t even stand editor integration plugins.

Edit: On topic, just test k8s config changes in prod :^)

I have been using Rancher Desktop since the day Docker announced they would charge corporations for Docker Desktop. I don't really need it much, but I genuinely could not have had a cleaner transition. I uninstalled Docker Desktop, and hit install on Rancher Desktop. Everything 'just worked' and I started using nerdctl. This was on Windows, and a few months ago now.

I tried to install it on my personal M1 Max Macbook, and it was annoying enough (the vm stuff, which was annoying with Docker Desktop) that I just used Multipass and installed docker. I would 100% recommend anyone dependent on Docker Desktop on Windows give it a shot.

This is something I find exciting! I was looking at our infrastructure and between all the various services, we basically have recreated k8s only more expensive and fragmented and tied explicitly to AWS.

On top of that, our local test env is based on docker-compose so it often has issues matching exactly to the deployed env in the cloud once you add all the networking.

I've wanted to start moving us to Kubernetes so we can have a much closer env across the board. In order to do this, we would need to support both osx and Linux development, and for this I was investigating minikube but my previous XP with minikube left me not liking that solution long term.

I look forward to investigating this tool and seeing the potential in a local development workflow.

Am I the only one that's starting to get a bit annoyed when random software for the desktop is getting called "XYZ Desktop"? I came here expecting a new desktop environment or WM called 'Rancher'.

A related thread from a few months ago:

Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28835690 - Oct 2021 (220 comments)

From https://rancherdesktop.io/ :

> Kubernetes and Container Management on the Desktop:

> An open-source desktop application for Mac, Windows and Linux.

> Rancher Desktop runs Kubernetes and container management on your desktop. You can choose the version of Kubernetes you want to run. You can build, push, pull, and run container images using either containerd or Moby (dockerd). The container images you build can be run by Kubernetes immediately without the need for a registry.

How does Rancher Desktop compare to Docker Desktop in terms of e.g. k8s support?

This is the Spite Store of containers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YlA6gtha-w

The killer feature over Docker for Mac would be memory ballooning. With this, there would be no need to specify a specific amount of memory, and the Linux VM would live happily alongside Mac OS. I know this is a limitation of Virtualisation/Hypervisor Framework apparently, but still.

It works wonder on WSL2, for instance.

Assigning all CPUs shouldn't do anything impactful really.

Can it be used to run Docker Compose workloads? As I understand, the tool is launched because at the end of January the Docker Desktop grace period elapses and it becomes paid for large business.

    brew install docker-compose

It's unclear from this website or the landing page of Rancher Desktop, can I use this to just run containers without involving the bloated mess which is Kubernetes? I just want to have something to run the container runtime cross-platform locally, without involving Kubernetes as I already run a different service for container management on my servers.

can't we do better than electron?

seriously?

a whole freaking browser only just to display few sliders, combobox and buttons?

this is very sad and concerning, either people are clueless, or they are clueless, i see no other reasons; you really not care at all, do you?

you use go already, use that https://fyne.io/

This is depressing actually.

Instead of working to simplify the desktop, people are pouring energy into solutions that further complexity everything.

I don't understand the comments on this thread that express excitement and enthusiasm.

To this day, the UX of the linux desktop is subpar. This is caused by the complexity involved in running a gnu/linux system.

We do not need additional layers of complexity.

We need to collapse the layers and simplify the architecture of everything.

Fedora Silverblue is a Linux desktop container distro https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/

Isn’t that essentially what fedora Silverblue is?

It’s an immutable desktop OS where everything is ran in flatpaks/podman pods for the most part and it’s actually a really great experience.

Can play stellaris on steam with it for example with no issue.

You can do exactly this with proxmox or esxi. Create a main "gaming vm" to autostart with GPU + USB passthrough. Then you can manage your other vms from the web browser on your gaming vm.

We're sort of desperately missing a high speed graphics option for VMs. Which is one of those things which feels like it should have become more prevalent by now with everyone throwing GPUs into server hardware and wanting to timeslice it amongst containers.

Have you tried Cubes OS?