But based on my experience, I would say someone worked their ass off to make that UI (because Docker is damn hard for newcomers) and the automatic updates (because zero-day exploits can happen and almost nobody checks for updates manually, and then you have tons of users at risk and incredibly bad PR) and simply didn’t consider adding the possibility of skipping or hiding those functionalities.
You just can’t do everything users want, but you do try hard to please almost everyone.
And if that person that did that work reads this comment, they will feel horrible when even after all this work, they still get mostly bad criticism and no thanks. Comments like these can break a person.
We got used to critiquing companies and products because we keep forgetting that behind them are just people working hard, and maybe 2-3 people in charge that make bad decisions along the way dragging everyone down with them.
In that case, seems fair enough that as a business suddenly being asked to pay for Docker Desktop, you'll start asking for a more polished experience.
But they've already done the incredibly hard part which is creating and popularising OCI, developing an engine that works on most operating systems, and having nice tooling around all of that.
Polishing the Docker Desktop experience should be fairly easy as soon as people let the Docker devs know how they expect it to work: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues
https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Ao...
It looks to me like they are attempting to attract funding.