Scribbd

But you can still get a bunch of good ones on the second hand markets. Also, NUCs are still a thing. Intel deemed the formfactor mature enough too pull out themselves and leave it too the partners to develop further.

You forgot the third option: A Mac ;)

I did some shallow digging, and my guess is the virtual machine that is started for each.

I see that the podman vm is a whole ass fedora image, at least back in 2021 when this article was written.

Rancher seems to use alpine if I understand the configuration correctly

Finch also uses fedora… I think. Their config is seemingly simple to the point it looks deceptive.

That is awesome. I prefer podman, despite what my list might suggest.

I work somewhere that doesn’t have licensing with Docker Inc. And I work on a Mac. With Docker desktop out of the picture, I got some experience with the alternatives. I know this post is about the native implementation and not the VM one, but I just wanted to add my 2 cents:

Alternatives run by me: Podman, Rancher Desktop, Finch

Results:

• Podman uses a lot more energy on idle than Finch and Rancher. On AVG 4 more Wats on an M1. (Normal idle is about 5W, so 9 almost doubles it cutting greatly in my battery life)
• Podman and Finch are not compatible with some tools that expect a full docker sock. In my case the AWS CDK and SAM CLI have issues. (Which is fun as Finch is also made by AWS)
• Finch does not offer a sock at all
• Finch requires you to recreate the full VM when updated.
• If you really want to have a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop, use Rancher Desktop. Rancher lacks in UI and the extension feature. But I never had issues with the sock, as I can run it with containerd.
• Finch has no UI
• Podman’s VM has clock drift if you put your machine in sleep. Only solution I found is to reboot the podman VM.
• Podman allows you to log in the VM with a command. I haven’t found a way on the others.