It's a lot faster if you don't rely on the default volume mounting: https://nodewood.com/blog/how-to-speed-up-docker-on-macos/

Still not as fast as on Linux, but within 10% of running it natively for me.

SO the argument here is that it's the storage layer that slows things down? I deduce this since the linked article is about installing a new storage driver to sync to external volumes.

What about server workloads where the storage is completely inside the container / on a different server?

It's less the storage layer and more the volume mount on OSX - the default is very reliable, but at the cost of a LOT of speed. Mutagen offers varying levels of reliability, and occasionally I have to restart the sync (like maybe once a week), but it's _much_ faster.

The circumstances you're describing sound like it wouldn't be suffering this specific issue in the first place, so I'm not sure how much it'd help.

A lot of people don't realize docker on macos runs in a vm.

It would be much nicer if apple coexisted instead of apple-language, apple-frameworks, apple-laserlike-navel-focus. Do community interaction, not just over-the-wall to opensource.apple.com

a native apple docker would be great. Imagine:

  FROM macos:10.13.2
  RUN xcode-build ....

Apple will never commoditize its own stuff.

They're perfectly willing to ruin the lives of countless devs / CI/CD devs, who have to support their crappy platforms, because you can't virtualize MacOS (only AWS can, and even then, it can only be rented in 24h increments at super high prices).

Apple controls the end users, their end users have money so devs just have to come crawling to be able to make and sell their apps.

I’ve used Anka for running macos VMs with good success. So much so that we replaced all our bare metal workloads with portable and repeatable environments. The trade offs are performance related and bugs with the VM tech but those are less costly than managing the bare metal.

That's true, unfortunately, volumes are especially problematic. Though I think it's gotten better over the years, and performance should be acceptable for most workflows.

I'm not saying it should be the _only_ distribution option, and standalone binaries and other packages should be provided as well, but there's no reason for Docker to not be one of them.

Also, I guess, it's needless to say, most of people don't have Docker already installed (unless your target audience is a dev-ops community). So it's not just "docker run".

Lol no. Docker is only slow on Mac. It works great on all other platforms.

It was slow on Windows to run Linux images the last time I tried. I think they now use WSL2 making it faster, but I haven't used it since.

It's not just slow on Windows, but BSOD shutdowns/reboots as well.