A related thread from a few months ago:
Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28835690 - Oct 2021 (220 comments)
Rancher Desktop 1.0
41–50 of 65 posts
Re: Rancher Desktop 1.0
#42These desktop applications look nice, but personally I’m much more comfortable with CLI tools. I have no idea what my colleagues are doing that use GUI git programs. I can’t even stand editor integration plugins. Edit: On topic, just test k8s config changes in prod :^)
You need Docker Desktop on macOS and Windows even if you don't want it. Please, send help :(
For Windows, you can run docker in WSL at least. It's also easy to install using the script at https://get.docker.com.
It will warn you about WSL and recommend Docker Desktop for Windows, which is funny since Docker Desktop can also run docker for you in WSL.
Re: Rancher Desktop 1.0
#43can't we do better than electron?
seriously?
a whole freaking browser only just to display few sliders, combobox and buttons?
this is very sad and concerning, either people are clueless, or they are clueless, i see no other reasons; you really not care at all, do you?
you use go already, use that https://fyne.io/
Re: Rancher Desktop 1.0
#44What's the state of Rancher these days? I was handing over a clients project and looking for someone to maintain it long term. I chose Rancher in my ignorance, but all Rancher did was tank the project. They installed their own halfbaked inhouse CloudNative Storage Provider, then quoted the client 50k to try to stabilize it. Their sales people were also nonstop trying to sell them on more consulting hours on top of th…
UI looks nice but is janky. Documentation is lacking, but sufficient. Longhorn works great (if you ignore CPU usage due to syncing when there's a lot of IOPS). Overal though self-hosting it has been pretty great for us from a usability perspective. Not sure if it's as enterprise-ready as they say though. Also haven't had to deal with their sales/support (yet).
Re: Rancher Desktop 1.0
#45This is depressing actually. Instead of working to simplify the desktop, people are pouring energy into solutions that further complexity everything. I don't understand the comments on this thread that express excitement and enthusiasm. To this day, the UX of the linux desktop is subpar. This is caused by the complexity involved in running a gnu/linux system. We do not need additional layers of complexity. We need to…
Rancher Desktop is
> an open source app for desktop Kubernetes and container management on Mac, Windows and Linux
What does that have to do with Linux desktop UX or running a GNU/Linux system?
I could see objecting to k8s and containers in general on the basis of too many layers, but by the time someone's looking at using Rancher Desktop they've probably made that decision already. (For instance, this caught my eye because at work we ship everything in containers. Even if I disliked that, there's no way I'm ever moving the whole company off containerization, so I want the best tools to do the job I have.)
Re: Rancher Desktop 1.0
#46can't we do better than electron? seriously? a whole freaking browser only just to display few sliders, combobox and buttons? this is very sad and concerning, either people are clueless, or they are clueless, i see no other reasons; you really not care at all, do you? you use go already, use that https://fyne.io/
Such a tiresome argument.
We need a whole freaking browser, only to display some text on this Web 1.0 hackernews website?
If the tool works well and doesn't use too many resources (see: VS Code, Spotify, Postman, among others that use a "browser" based UI), why does it matter?
Let developers choose the tools they want to build the things they want to build. You want a k8s desktop app written in fyne-io? Go for it!
Re: Rancher Desktop 1.0
#47It feels like we're late to create the desktop experience where most things run in containers. My wish is to run something like Proxmox as a "stable base", and within it have a VM for my firewall (pfsense), my primary Linux OS (Fedora/Arch), a VM for services (Docker & k8s), and a VM for Windows gaming. I like the separation of concerns. I've wanted to do all of this on a laptop but I can't get a VM to exclusively ta…
We're sort of desperately missing a high speed graphics option for VMs. Which is one of those things which feels like it should have become more prevalent by now with everyone throwing GPUs into server hardware and wanting to timeslice it amongst containers.
Re: Rancher Desktop 1.0
#48These desktop applications look nice, but personally I’m much more comfortable with CLI tools. I have no idea what my colleagues are doing that use GUI git programs. I can’t even stand editor integration plugins. Edit: On topic, just test k8s config changes in prod :^)
The command line interface is the easiest interface to script around, but it's also probably the least discoverable.
GUI programs have much better discoverability. But ... it's generally hard to drive them with a keyboard.
Emacs' magit or lazydocker strike me as a nice balance. Not as expressive as the command line, but powerfully keyboard-focused.
Re: Rancher Desktop 1.0
#49It's unclear from this website or the landing page of Rancher Desktop, can I use this to just run containers without involving the bloated mess which is Kubernetes? I just want to have something to run the container runtime cross-platform locally, without involving Kubernetes as I already run a different service for container management on my servers.
Re: Rancher Desktop 1.0
#50Am I the only one that's starting to get a bit annoyed when random software for the desktop is getting called "XYZ Desktop"? I came here expecting a new desktop environment or WM called 'Rancher'.