This is like the 5th or 6th frontpage macOS container strategy this week. Wouldn't it be better to have native containers by just using Linux? What advantage do people get hy using macOS?
Great laptops and hardware; low hassle setup. There is some initial linux support for the M1 hardware but using mac os is a bit easier. The instructions for getting docker going on a mac are a lot shorter than getting linux going on an M1. So, if you have one, figuring out how you are going to run docker is something to do. And there are many options now.
I actually have a Manjaro laptop that I used for work for almost a year and it was great. Except for the hardware (generic cheapo wintel garbage). I'm back on a Mac now. Nice M1 laptop. Fast, silent, good keyboard and screen. Wonderful to use. Mostly my biggest headache is muscle memory for different key bindings and keyboard layout because I still use the linux laptop once in a while. But otherwise all my stuff (including docker) just works on both sides.
Docker for mac is nice but the licensing can be a bit of a show stopper. I've yet to try some of the alternatives mentioned here. I did use qemu on my old intel mac for a while with some simple environment variables to make the homebrew version of docker use ssh to my vm. It works but it can be a bit wonky with things like port forwarding and volumes. You can make all that work but it is a bit fiddly. Most of the proper alternatives make this a bit more seamless. But I'd recommend trying it just to de-mystify the whole process.
There is a docker desktop for linux even; which just goes to show that it does do a few things that are worthwhile having for some people. Even on Linux. I'm mostly a cli guy so I don't care about the UI/UX that it provides. But some people seem to like that.
MacOS contains tons of nice usability as a working environment, and even has great rolling package management with Homebrew, but the lack of native containers is the single biggest downside, basically preventing us from using containers more extensively at my work. The blocker for us is data work that needs a lot of memory locally, meaning it wouldn't work for us to allocate it to a VM for containers.
The question applies both ways: what advantage (other than native container support) do I get by running Linux?
Personally I would love to see OCI containers supported natively on other operating systems. Currently you get the same VM crapshow on e.g. OpenBSD, except the community is several orders of magnitude smaller, so you don't even get prepackaged solutions.
I get the advantage of transparent source code, a vibrant community supporting amazing projects, first-class support for new concepts and features.
> Personally I would love to see OCI containers supported natively on other operating systems. Currently you get the same VM crapshow on e.g. OpenBSD, except the community is several orders of magnitude smaller, so you don't even get prepackaged solutions.
Talk to your OS vendor. They are the ones who are preventing this from working.
Why? Linux is a community project that is open source, and containers are based on Linux. If you want native support for your proprietary OS then talk to your proprietary OS vendor since they are the one who should be supporting it.
So what are the leftover steps we'd need to take, from "has containerd support" until "pkg_add docker && rcctl start dockerd && docker run -ti --rm hello-world"?
For who? People that don't want to learn a different operating system? I use it and it works great. Just got done playing some Steam games on Linux. Steam decided to choose Linux for their Deck cause it is pretty amazing.
