Docker's Second Death

Re:Docker's Second Death by Wowfunhappy on Sunday December 06, 2020 @03:24PM (#25326333)

> Docker images depend on Linux which means "Docker" on macOS runs in a Linux VM. Presumably docker for Windows could use WSL.

WSL2 is also a VM. Docker is in truth Linux-only software, and "Docker" on any other platform is a polished interface for spinning up a Linux VM and running the real version of Docker there.

I don't think this is such a bad thing. What non-Linux Docker really provides is a nice UI.

On my Mac, I switched from doing a lot of development in VMWare Fusion to using docker-machine (set up to still use VMWare under the hood). With docker-machine especially, it's quite obvious that I'm still just using a VM, but it all feels a lot more seamless than when I was running a bunch of commands to start up VMWare, SSH in, and sync my local files.

----------

† I can't use Docker Desktop because I insist on running an old version of OS X.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Docker's Second Death by Kwpolska on Sunday December 06, 2020 @04:33PM (#25326872)

Docker for Windows is capable of running Linux containers (on top of WSL2 or a Docker-specific Hyper-V VM), and it can also run Windows containers. You can only pick one of those, but if you want to containerize Windows software, Docker can do this. (If you’re on Windows 10 Home, only the WSL2 backend is available.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Docker's Second Death by crazysim on Sunday December 06, 2020 @08:21PM (#25328440)

You can actually run both Windows and Linux containers at the same time. You don't need to pick "one of these". I think the flag to switch between them on the fly is "--platform".

[ Parent | on HN ]