Folks, the docker runtime is open source, and not even the only one of its kind. They won’t charge for that. If they tried to make it closed source, everyone would just laugh and switch to one of several completely free alternatives. They charge for hosting images, build time on their build servers, and various “premium” developer tools you don’t need. In fact, you need none of this, you can do all of it yourself on whatever hardware you deem to be good enough. There are also many other hosted alternatives out there.
Docker thinks they have a monopoly, for some reason. If you use the technology, you are probably already aware that they don’t.
Does that include running Windows containers? It seems like the alternatives don’t support those.
Windows container runtime is free as well, simply install the docker runtime from chocolatey or winget along with the Windows Containers and Hyper-V windows features. This is what we do on some build machines for CI.
Theres no reason to use desktop other than “ease of use”
There are some reasons. Networking can get messed up, so Docker Desktop “fixed that” for you, but the dirty secret is it’s basically a Linux VM with Docker CE and some convenience network routes.
Youre talking about Linux containers on Windows, I think commenter above was referring to windows containers on Windows, which is its own special hell for lucky folks like me.
Otherwise I totally agree. Ive done both setups without docker desktop.
Wait…y’all were paying for Docker?
the enshittification begins…
Begins?!? Docker Inc was waist deep in enshittification the moment they started rate limiting docker hub, which was nearly 3 or 4 years ago.
This is just another step towards the deep end. Companies that could easily move away from docker hub, did so years ago. The companies that remain struggle to leave and will continue to pay.
When that happened our DevOps teams migrated all our prod k8’s to podman, with zero issues. Docker who?
Hot take: Good for them.
This will have zero impact on 99% of independent developers. Most small companies can move to an alternative or roll their own infrastructure. This will only really impact large corporations. I’m all for corporation-on-corporation violence. Let them fight.
Their entire offering is such a joke. I’m forced to use Docker Desktop for work, as we’re on Windows. Every time that piece of shit gets updated, it’s more useless garbage. Endless security snake oil features. Their installer even messes with your WSL home directory. They literally fuck with your AWS and Azure credentials to make it more “convenient” for you to use their cloud integrations. When they implemented that, they just deleted my AWS profile from my home directory, because they felt it should instead be a symlink to my Windows home directory. These people are not to be trusted with elevated privileges on your system. They actively abuse the privilege.
The only reason they exist is that they are holding the majority of images hostage on their registry. Their customers are similarly being held hostage, because they started to use Docker on Windows desktops and are now locked in. Nobody gives a shit about any of their benefits. Free technology and hosting was their setup, now they let everyone bleed who got caught. Prices will rise until they find their sweet spot. Thanks for the tech. Now die already.
Enshitification is a very, very real thing. GitLab did something similar with raising pricing by 5x a few years back.
Podman guys… Podman All the way…
I don’t think you even need Docker licenses to run Linux containers, but unfortunately I need to deal with this because I have some legacy software running in windows containers.
Anyone looking for a free drop in replacement, I’ve been using Rancher Desktop without any issues https://rancherdesktop.io/
I’ve been using podman desktop (https://podman-desktop.io/) which is also free. I’ve never heard of rancher desktop so I’ll have to give that a look!
Oh shit, what would I do without… Scout Analysis?
Don’t you mean SWOT analysis?
You SWOT m8?
sware on me scrum
I’m sure “professionals” can afford $4
Our 200 developers all switched from docker desktop to rancher after Docker tried to jack up the price about a year and a half ago, along with a bunch of legal threats. Their attitude was so piss poor, we went from debating paying the higher fees to just fucking them off entirely.
I will pay $4 per user to NOT use Docker.
Are You guys really pulling more than 40 images per hour? Isn’t the free one enough?
A single malfunctioning service that restarts in a loop can exhaust the limit near instantly. And now you can’t bring up any of your services, because you’re blocked.
I’ve been there plenty of times. If you have to rely on docker.io, you better pay up. Running your own NexusRM or Harbor to proxy it can drastically improve your situation though.
Docker is a pile of shit. Steer clear entirely of any of their offerings if possible.
I thought docker was FOSS? What exactly are they charging you for?
Support. If your a business, you pay to keep uptime high. This is unnecessary for most people.
If you’re a business and need uptime you shouldn’t be using Docker Desktop in the first place
You would be amazed
Not amazed, just depressed.
How is the transition from docker to podman? I’m using two compose scripts and like 10 containers each. And portainer to comfortably restart stuff on the fly
from what I can gather its currently recommended to use quadlets to generate systemd units to achieve what compose was doing. podman compose is a thing but IIRC I didn’t find that was straight drop in and I had to change the syntax or formatting a bit for it to work and from the brief testing I have put in quadlets seems less hassle, but if you use a non systemd distro then I don’t know.
I can only provide my experience; it was a drop-in replacement. I have 7 services running and 3 db containers. I was able to migrate using the Podman official instructions without issue.
I’d say about 99% is the same.
Two notable things that were different were:
- Podman config file is different which I needed to edit where containers are stored since I have a dedicated location I want to use
- The preferred method for running Nvidia GPUs in containers is CDI, which imo is much more concise than Docker’s Nvidia GPU device setup.
The second one is also documented on the CUDA Container Toolkit site, and very easy to edit a compose file to use CDI instead.
There’s also some small differences here and there like podman asking for a preferred remote source instead of defaulting to dockerhub.
Dev containers have been dead for a long time.
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