Alternative to Docker Desktop

container

Running microservices in an isolated environment is most promising for developers. If it works on developers' machines it will work anywhere if you use containers.

Docker will be the preferred container engine (Docker, CRI-O, containerd) for many developers. Docker Desktop changed the terms and it is not free to everyone. Read the blog or visit their FAQ to learn more about the updates.

Okay. What will be the alternatives for Docker Desktop,

• Rancher Desktop
• lima + containerd
• Podman

Rancher Desktop

Installing Rancher Desktop is easy for any Operating systems. With Rancher you can build the container images. As well you could run a local Kubernetes cluster.

Kubernetes is provisioned by k3s, it is lightweight distribution.

From Rancher Dashboard, you can change container engine at any time.

• containerd
• dockerd

Check further details about installation and other configurations from official documentation

lima + containerd

container engine is entirely dependant on the container features of the Linux kernel. That’s why Docker containers cannot run on Windows and Mac operating systems natively.

To overcome this problem, Docker Desktop internally uses Linux VM Hyper-V(Windows) and HyperKit(MacOs)

lima — Linux Virtual Machine for macOS

It provides automatic file sharing, port forwarding and containerd.

GitHub - lima-vm/lima: Linux virtual machines, typically on macOS, for running containerd

Installing lima in mac is simple.

brew install lima

All the commands are same as like docker to build images in contained. To avoid long typing lima commands for everytime, set alias

alias docker=lima nerdctl

Podman

Podman is another opn source container engine for developing, managing, and running containers. It is developed by Red Hat.

Podman relies on an OCI compliant Container Runtime (runc, crun, runv, etc) to create the running containers.

Podman installation and useful commands , check out from official docs.