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With the Docker enterprise licensing stuff last year, I had to cease use of Docker Desktop at work which has been really annoying. As a non-dev who dabbles and roles their own tools it means my primary use case of firing up a DB really quickly and easily when needed is gone.

I've been eyeing podman but the additional friction scares me off from jumping in. Has anyone else not doing full-time dev found it (or similar) a simple enough replacement?



> With the Docker enterprise licensing stuff last year

(In case someone else also had missed all of that.)

Commercial use of Docker Desktop at a company of more than 250 employees OR more than $10 million in annual revenue requires a paid subscription (Pro, Team, or Business) to use Docker Desktop.


I am using Podman infrequently on Windows. It works just fine, although I had to go rootful for a few containers. They've seen been updated to not need it.

Podman Desktop replaces Docker Desktop.

The only "problem" is that the auto-restart policy doesn't apply between reboots. I kinda get why, and it's not a huge problem for me to start the containers I care about via Podman Desktop when I want to use them. In a sense it works better because if I reboot they all stop and are not using resources.


If you enable the podman-restart service on the linux server, restart on boot should work fine. For rootless containers, you also need to enable linger mode for the rootless user.


I'm using Colima ( https://github.com/abiosoft/colima ) and am very happy with it so far.

Here's an article about it: How Colima is a good alternative to Docker Desktop ( https://kumojin.com/en/colima-alternative-docker-desktop/ )

I'm using Colima together with DDEV ( https://ddev.com ) to create and run PHP projects (webserver + db) in containers. Clean, very easy to use, and fast.


What can you do with docker desktop that you can't with docker on its own?

Besides there are myriads of other docker gui than docker desktop. Even the non official podman desktop gui can connect to a docker daemon.


Looks like you can install the Apache-licensed Docker engine + CLI via Chocolatey:

https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/docker-engine

https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/docker-cli

So it seems the Docker Inc. enterprise licensing is all based on the "Docker Desktop" UI. Can someone confirm this?


Install Docker in WSL (still free). Install Rancher Desktop. Connect to Docker in WSL.

Or if on Linux same as above, but remove the WSL part.


Problem for developers in the Microsoft stack is that Visual Studio requires Docker Desktop to be installed - unless Rancher is able to fake that.


> Problem for developers in the Microsoft stack is that Visual Studio requires Docker Desktop to be installed

I'm not sure what you are referring to here. I run Docker engine in WSL2, and vscode in Windows. It all seems to work seemlessly to me. What am I missing?


Visual Studio is not vscode.


How do you interact with Visual Studio and Docker? I'll see what I can come up with.


There are two facets to this:

- It calls Docker (docker command) to build and run images

- Visual Studio has an UI to manage containers and images (not sure what it uses under the hood for this)


So by doing what I said I have `docker` in Powershell.

To recap, I have the following:

Docker (CLI ONLY!!!) on Ubuntu on WSL as described here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/

   sudo apt list --installed 2>&1 | grep docker
  docker-buildx-plugin/kinetic,now 0.10.2-1~ubuntu.22.10~kinetic amd64 [installed,automatic]
  docker-ce-cli/kinetic,now 5:23.0.0-1~ubuntu.22.10~kinetic amd64 [installed]
  docker-compose-plugin/kinetic,now 2.15.1-1~ubuntu.22.10~kinetic amd64 [installed,automatic]
  docker-compose/kinetic,now 1.29.2-2 all [installed]
  docker-scan-plugin/kinetic,now 0.23.0~ubuntu-kinetic amd64 [installed,automatic]
  python3-docker/kinetic,now 5.0.3-1 all [installed,automatic]
  python3-dockerpty/kinetic,now 0.4.1-4 all [installed,automatic]
So I'd say start with installing

  docker-ce-cli
Rancher Desktop from here: https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/releases

Then in Rancher Desktop you enable WSL integration as shown here: https://imgur.com/a/yKV8S9e

With this done you should be able to have the docker command in Pwsh

I can do docker image ls etc like a full Docker setup!


have you looked into installing an actual linux distribution on wsl2 and using docker on that?




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