Personally, this is the behavior I want and I think that is correct. I just installed OrbStack. That means I want it to take over as the new way to use docker. Switching back to any other system is easy and it is documented here: https://docs.orbstack.dev/faq#revert-docker
I suppose Orbstack should make it more obvious what it did and how to revert though.
# Switch to OrbStack
docker context use orbstack
# Switch to Colima
docker context use colima
What are your plans for Virtual Machines? I know GUI support is planned but are you planning for Virtualization features to challenge the likes of maybe Parallels?
EDIT: Also, are you planning on supporting macOS VMs?
The plan is for machines to be like WSL2: as integrated as possible. Not sure what you mean by Virtualization features?
I won't say never, but no plans for macOS or Windows VMs for now.
I just updated and saw the notification and passed it along to my legal department to get approval for purchase.
Do you know if you are, or have any plans to be, SOC2 Compliant?
It looks like a quality tool, but I feel like most tenured Docker users will see a 'Pricing' page and close the window with their muscle-memory.
Docker Desktop for Mac is not open source either.
Orbstack is better in every single way.
It's also a lot cheaper than the Docker Business rate (at least according to their pricing page), and the saved developer time should pay for itself quickly. It could even mean that companies can ditch expensive EC2 cloud dev environments, for example.
So far you're far ahead of the competition in multiple of the ways that matter most. I've tried all of the competition and I don't want any of it on my computer.
The fact that it is dead simple to install, migrate, and use also gives you a huge leg up when we consider adopting it for our company. I absolutely don't want to spin up a support channel to help people migrate to or troubleshoot podman or rancher.
Again though, I think the majority of users will either reach for something like Lima, Podman or Rancher given the history of the space. Relying on a subscription-service UI layer to use Docker is kinda redundant when everything inside is also freely available. If I was still evaluating Docker clients at-scale, I'm not sure this would make the cut.
I'll fully believe that Orbstack is superior to Docker on Mac. It's just hard to understand 'the sell' when there are so many high-quality Free alternatives. Then again, I'm the sort of Mac user who CMD+Q's whenever I read "buy me a coffee" or the like.
It's certainly not that. In fact you don't even need to have the app running in order to use docker!
Ive lost the link now but somewhere @Danny explains the different layers (like networking, file sharing, domains etc) that he had to write from scratch that are not part of Docker (the engine)
For example. One of the longest bugs in Docker for Mac has been file-sharing/bind mounts... Orbstack performance over Docker for Mac in this respect is incredible. Also Docker for Mac (still) doesnt have ipv6 whereas Orbstack enables this out of the box seamlessly.
Thinking of Orbstack as "just another UI for docker" is completely wrong.
For most businesses looking at something like this, they will either want a comprehensive support contract or comprehensive ownership. Orbstack will struggle here, especially considering how it has basically nothing to do with the deployed product at most companies. You're not going to run production on Orbstack, so the value of it is pretty dubious relative to even a bad product like Docker Desktop.
I swear I'm not trying to be too harsh here, I used Docker Desktop on Mac at my last job too. My team was researching alternatives to it, and given what we were looking at I don't think Orbstack would be compelling. The FOSS alternatives worked just fine for testing and development.