Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop • Hacker News Board

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#161

Post by florentbenoit » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:05 AM UTC

arunc wrote: post #142

Help me understand, is this a replacement for docker desktop? Docker desktop provides kubernetes in a neat way. Does podman provide k8s on WSL?

podman itself allows to play some subset of kubernetes files with the kube play command if you want to just use containers (no cluster required) https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-kube-play.1...

Podman Desktop is planning also to bring a Kubernetes cluster very easily. For now you can deploy to an existing Kubernetes cluster the Pod (set of containers that Podman provides) and you can also switch your current context from the tray icon.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#162

Post by _cenw » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:08 AM UTC

LooerCell wrote: post #31

Recently I started using colima[0], a drop in replacement for Docker Desktop on Mac, and have seen an increase in performance and battery life. You can use all the normal docker and docker compose commands. It does not have a GUI but you can use the Docker extension on VS Code to have an overview of running containers. [0] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

somehow colima and my corporate vpn (using vpnc) keep deleting each others routes (colima loses network access when you turn off vpnc) and neither podman machine nor rancher desktop have this issue.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#163

Post by afhammad » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:18 AM UTC

ArcMex wrote: post #153

LooerCell wrote: post #31

Recently I started using colima[0], a drop in replacement for Docker Desktop on Mac, and have seen an increase in performance and battery life. You can use all the normal docker and docker compose commands. It does not have a GUI but you can use the Docker extension on VS Code to have an overview of running containers. [0] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Sorry but off topic. At what point did containerization begin to make sense for your workflow?

Not OP, but if it's helpful, I use containers for all 3rd party services I need to run for development. (e.g. Postgres, Redis, Localstack, etc). This makes it easy to onboard new developers as they just have to run `docker-compose up` and not worry about those. It also allows me to easily use different versions of those services in different projects or even branches of a project.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#164

Post by yrro » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:37 AM UTC

bongobingo1 wrote: post #159

doublepg23 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running into edge issues and always trying to figure out if it was my container, Podman, or SELinux is making me very close to installing regular docker.

I want to love SELinux, sounds great, I can see the real value in it. Tried to deploy some containers on an SE system and it would block everything. Ok expected, it actually has great tools for discovering, suggesting and creating rules to poke holes where needed, but it only suggests those things post-facto. So basically you're left deploying a container and waiting for something to break, then inspecting SE logs an…

> Maybe I just missed an obvious route to disable swaths of SELinux for rootless containers

Yeah you can put container_t into permissive mode:

# semanage permissive -a container_t

AVC denials will still be logged but the operations won't be denied.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#165

Post by bongobingo1 » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:45 AM UTC

yrro wrote: post #164

bongobingo1 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to love SELinux, sounds great, I can see the real value in it. Tried to deploy some containers on an SE system and it would block everything. Ok expected, it actually has great tools for discovering, suggesting and creating rules to poke holes where needed, but it only suggests those things post-facto. So basically you're left deploying a container and waiting for something to break, then inspecting SE logs an…

> Maybe I just missed an obvious route to disable swaths of SELinux for rootless containers Yeah you can put container_t into permissive mode: # semanage permissive -a container_t AVC denials will still be logged but the operations won't be denied.

It sounds like podman containers should automatically get that label so I'll give it another look, thanks!

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#166

Post by yrro » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:53 AM UTC

bongobingo1 wrote: post #165

yrro wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I just missed an obvious route to disable swaths of SELinux for rootless containers Yeah you can put container_t into permissive mode: # semanage permissive -a container_t AVC denials will still be logged but the operations won't be denied.

It sounds like podman containers should automatically get that label so I'll give it another look, thanks!

Yeah, use ps -Z PID (from outside of a container) to check its label.

Some other useful sources of info - the container_selinux man page tells you about container_t. And an index of Dan Walsh's blog posts about containers & SELinux can be found in the README of https://github.com/containers/container-selinux>.

And of course the RHEL documentation for creatign custom SELinux policies that inherit from container_t (for instance, I use it to allow processes within a container to read their certificates out of /etc/pki/tls which is normally forbidden. It's documented here: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#167

Post by drcongo » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 10:02 AM UTC

russelg wrote: post #102

jzelinskie wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking to convert, but I still can't understand how this is more performant. Docker Desktop has lots of engineering going into performance crossing the host/VM barrier. IIRC lima just pipes over SSH. How could that be faster?

It's quite trivial to have both installed and you can easily switch between Colima and Docker, I think it's worth testing it out.

I only use Docker Desktop for one thing - to see if one of my containers has accidentally started itself as amd64 instead of arm64. Sadly Colima doesn't seem to provide a way to do that.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#168

Post by jbverschoor » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 10:37 AM UTC

fuckstick wrote: post #150

mfer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I user Rancher Desktop on an i9 with 32gb of RAM. Starts in less than a minute. I also have Teams and slack. Sometimes I have over 200 browser tabs open (yes, I have a problem). The UI is responsive pretty quickly. A lot of delays has to do with starting VMs. You need this for Linux on Mac/Windows. Disclaimer: I started Rancher Desktop. I might be biased.

> I user Rancher Desktop on an i9 with 32gb of RAM. Starts in less than a minute. This is considered good?

Reminds me of people working on Java apps, who had to wait 2-3 minutes for every freaking change

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#169

Post by nickjj » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 11:02 AM UTC

moondev wrote: post #47

I have been experimenting with the arm64 windows dev kit, neither docker desktop, podman desktop or rancher desktop had arm64 builds. Installing the amd64 builds did not work either. I was surprised to find out wsl2 now supports systemd https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-i... I was able to install docker normally inside wsl2 and it worked perfectly. No "desktop" app needed. This will be a game…

I've been running Docker on WSL 2 for a while now, without systemd or Docker Desktop. There's no need to wait for systemd.

You can install Docker following their Linux guide and then in your shell's profile file add:

    if grep -q "microsoft" /proc/version &>/dev/null; then
        if service docker status 2>&1 | grep -q "is not running"; then
            wsl.exe --distribution "${WSL_DISTRO_NAME}" --user root \
                --exec /usr/sbin/service docker start >/dev/null 2>&1
        fi
    fi

Basically the first time you open a terminal it'll pause for 5 seconds while the Docker daemon is started but it'll stay started for the duration of your Windows uptime even if you close your terminal. The next time you open a terminal it'll be instant.

Re: Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop

#170

Post by alex3305 » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 11:23 AM UTC

mfer wrote: post #26

blibble wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For personal use I found it great and lighter than Docker Desktop. I don't know what Docker Desktop is doing but on a top end i9 with 128gb of ram it still takes 60 seconds to start and the UI takes forever to do anything it makes Teams look responsive

I user Rancher Desktop on an i9 with 32gb of RAM. Starts in less than a minute. I also have Teams and slack. Sometimes I have over 200 browser tabs open (yes, I have a problem). The UI is responsive pretty quickly. A lot of delays has to do with starting VMs. You need this for Linux on Mac/Windows. Disclaimer: I started Rancher Desktop. I might be biased.

Last week I switched from Rancher Desktop back to Docker Desktop because I couldn't get VSCode Dev Containers to work properly. I was stumped because it should work out of the box. However it didn't work on a fresh install of Docker Desktop either. Apparently when Rancher Desktop was first released I've installed it and setup a Docker alias in my ~/.zshrc:

   alias docker=nerdctl

After removing that alias everything worked first try with Docker Desktop. However after starting up a couple of Dev containers and some debugger my machine crawled to a halt and was memory swapping like there was no tomorrow. I found that this behavior could be normal for Docker Desktop. So I think I'm going to switch back to Rancher Desktop (or perhaps Podman Desktop) sooner than later.