for-mac VS colima

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

version: '3' services: graph-node: image: graphprotocol/graph-node ports: - '8000:8000' - '8001:8001' - '8020:8020' - '8030:8030' - '8040:8040' depends_on: - ipfs - postgres extra_hosts: - host.docker.internal:host-gateway environment: postgres_host: postgres postgres_user: graph-node postgres_pass: let-me-in postgres_db: graph-node ipfs: 'ipfs:5001' matic: 'matic:http://localhost:8545/' GRAPH_LOG: info ipfs: image: ipfs/go-ipfs:v0.10.0 ports: - '5001:5001' volumes: - ./data/ipfs:/data/ipfs postgres: image: postgres ports: - '5432:5432' command: [ "postgres", "-cshared_preload_libraries=pg_stat_statements" ] environment: POSTGRES_USER: graph-node POSTGRES_PASSWORD: let-me-in POSTGRES_DB: graph-node # FIXME: remove this env. var. which we shouldn't need. Introduced by # , maybe as a # workaround for https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/6270? PGDATA: "/var/lib/postgresql/data" POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS: "-E UTF8 --locale=C" volumes: - ./data/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data

This bug has been around years and still not fixed as far as I know - see https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3926

You're not wrong, and not the first to raise this https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/6061

https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/6867 This github issue might help. What worked for me was deleting the ~/.docker/buildx folder

There has been an outstanding bug [Docker Github] for years with the Docker team who do not seem to be able (or want to) address this - they have closed more than one issue but its still there.. The latest bug report is this one [Docker Github] but I honestly would not bother following it - no idea why they are not fixing this.

Have you checked if any of your other Docker containers become unresponsive at the same time? If so, it could be Docker. I had this issue on Docker for months until they finally came out with an update that works for me (Docker Desktop 4.19.0 for Mac).

It might have something to do with Docker? I was having issues a few months ago with all my containers becoming unreachable or very slow many times per day. I finally upgraded to Docker Desktop 4.19.0 (I’m on a Mac) and everything resolved. There were a few GitHub issues about it, too. You could try running a speedtest within different Docker containers and seeing if there’s a discrepancy. You could also check your RAM and CPU usage for different containers using something like Glances; it could lead to a clue.

While looking into the issue with Podman, I came across colima. Apart from being able to run AMD64 images out of the box, there were additional benefits to it, one of which was, unlike podman, colima could use Rosetta 2 for x64 emulation (which is significantly more performant).

If you don't need a GUI, the following combo works pretty well:

- https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

- https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

You might look into CoLima as a way to get started.

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima?tab=readme-ov-file

Its user interface is Docker-like, using containers.

For full desktop, I've only used the commercial app "Parallels", which can set up an Ubuntu desktop for you. Also Fedora and Alpine and Debian I believe.

But

> I don't really have any resources to share. I just know how to boot a vmlinuz with an initramfs using QEMU, and decided to download the Linux kernel source code and try compiling it.

I highly recommend working through Linux from Scratch and possibly the Gentoo Handbook. It's a journey.

I could not find any guide how to add WASM container capability to Docker running on Colima. This guide provides a few Colima templates for exactly this, which adds WasmEdge, Wasmtime and Wasmer runtime types.

Colima runs much faster on Macos: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

After docker desktop became unusable, I jumped to colima and never looked back. I still use the docker runtime in it (the non-proprietary part) but it also supports containerd. On Mac it's just a "brew install colima" and then "colima start"

I also install the compose and ecr credentials plug-ins (since I use ecr for my container registry.) It has the full functionality of docker desktop minus the UI, which I never used anyways.

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

On my M1 Pro system, I have nothing but positive things to say about the experience of using Colima (https://github.com/abiosoft/colima). Quick to set up and fast to use.

I'd say Lima and Colima should be enough for most use cases:

https://lima-vm.io/

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

The bash/zsh equivalent wouldn't be too hard, but I use fish.

[0] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima, https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fabiosof...

[1] https://orbstack.dev [3], https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Forbstack.dev

[2] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima#customizing-the-vm and https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/blob/main/docs/FAQ.md#edi...

[3] I’m on OrbStack now, but it isn’t so much better at how I use Docker than Colima is that I think that it’s an instant buy, especially with the planned subscription model. If I used anything other than the Docker integration, I might think it's better, but as of right now, no.

I also have some issues with its insistence on asking for elevated permissions. I will never grant permission[4] to make a symlink to the "standard" Docker socket; context and `$DOCKER_HOST` work well enough. It should not ask if the permission hasn't been given once. I also worry about other "advanced" features that may need an elevated permissions helper[5].

[4] https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/281#issuecomment...

[5] https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/281#issuecomment... and following