nerdctl VS for-win

Direct use of containerd? containerd? turns out I didn't know anything about container technology. containerd was originally developed by Docker in 2015 as a daemon that provided basic container management capabilities under Docker. containerd's scope has gradually expanded and now seems to cover almost everything in the Docker Engine. For example, nerdctl is a CLI for containerd; the UX is almost identical to the Docker CLI, and Docker Compose is also supported (nerdctl compose).

Nerdctl[1] (for containerd) works fine with docker-compose.yml for my purposes (which are not much). The only issue I encountered was with environment variable substitution not working the same as docker-compose, but I didn't look hard for a solution and edited my compose file

1. https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl mine came bundled with Rancher desktop, and 'nerdctl compose up' is all I've needed

I haven't tried it personally but you might be able to export the tar from docker host with docker cli and then load it on containerd host using nerdctl - https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl

It looks like the real nice thing here is having a formula for QEMU with the ARM patch applied: https://github.com/simnalamburt/qemu/tree/hvf

With this I believe you could also used [nerd](https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl) instead of podman but I haven't tested it yet.

One area, where containerd didn't had a first class support was CLI. the default containerd CLI "ctr" has a very naive implementation. The reason for that I believe is, containerd as a system was never meant to be consumed by humans, and was designed to be consumed by higher layers e.g. orchestration systems like nomad or k8s. However, with the deprecation of dockershim in k8s, and users moving to containerd, a new docker compatible CLI came out:

https://github.com/AkihiroSuda/nerdctl

If you just have containerd running on your system (with no docker daemon running), you can just install nerdctl and add

alias docker="nerdctl"

to your ~/.bashrc file.

Then you can just run any docker commands the way you used to with docker, and it will run those commands against the containerd API giving you the same CLI experience that you used to have with docker.

Fifth thing: Bricker of Windows

https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/1549

Still pissed my HP Windows laptop was bricked from it a few months ago. I’ll never use it for anything.

I use containers on Mac and Windows for development (and we deploy on linux). Docker for Mac is _unusably_ slow in my experience. The VM that it runs is a giant resource hog and a battery hog, and doesn't support ipv6 [0] Docker Desktop itself is (another) resource hog, wildly buggy, and painfully slow. It's the epitome of "shitty electron app".

On windows, docker desktop has all of the same issues as it does on mac. Docker's concept of volumes and file permissions on windows are nonsense. Windows updates and Docker Desktop regularly decide to disagree, [1] It's networking support interferes with other applications (like OpenVPN and the Xbox Game Center) [2].

[0] https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/1432

[1] https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/599

[2] https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/1976

I have a GitHub post here I made that goes into more detail: https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/13320

possibly related to https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/13324 ?

> FWIW, when denying the request to wootric, the docker daemon crashes.

A yes, this about fits the standard of engineering I've come to expect from Docker.

Anyway, I couldn't find any references too "woocentric" anywhere in the code; looks like this part isn't open source? I did find this other issue: https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/12718 with a comment from May 2022:

"At some point we found out that bugsnag was actually sending a «session creation» request of some sort when initialized, even if no crash was actually being reported. We believed we had fixed that, but I just checked with a MITM proxy and it appears to have regressed… There may be some other services doing something similar without us realizing (wootric, …).

We have created a ticket in our internal backlog to review all this."

Docker Github issue

I ran into this error ( no matching manifest for linux/amd64 in the manifest list entries ), so I tried again on my Windows machine. But then I realized that Docker on Windows actually just runs on WSL2, and it's technically Linux as well! Supposedly, I can switch to Windows containers by clicking on "Switch to Linux container...", but I guess apparently not on Windows 10 Home?? https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/9701