pods VS colima

If you're using Linux (especially with Gnome), I can highly recommend Pods[1] as a desktop client for Podman. It's much less cluttered than Podman Desktop, but still supports most of its features.

[1] https://github.com/marhkb/pods#readme

Pods is a GTK4 frontend for Podman. I installed it from Arch AUR. But I think it also available as a Flatpak.

Pods GUI frontend for podman container.

Check out Symphony Pods that was featured in This week in Gnome 35

There is Symphony to manage Podman, but I imagine with some tinkering it can be made to work with Docker.

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