that will get you a fast virtiofs VM with the latest docker, including compose and buildx. it may seem scary to replace an officially blessed tool like Docker Desktop, but i have had zero issues with colima. it isn't "docker compatible". it's docker. just need to run `brew upgrade` and `colima update` every once in a while to keep it up to date.
I’ve been using OrbStack instead of Docker Desktop and gotta say, I’d not replace it with anything else. So if anyones looking for a more automated alternative, check out OrbStack.
I hear great things about OrbStack; unfortunately the licensing tied to their free offering doesn't play nicely with corporate environments (and we're cheap!).
I switched to Colima instead and couldn't be happier.
I tried to use podman desktop for a bit but I ran into some screwy compatibility issues. It just wasn't as smooth as docker.
I really really want an alternative to docker desktop. I don't like the path they're going down. I don't like the AI crap in the UI. The licensing is crazy. It just doesn't feel right.
So I've been lately using rancher by SuSE. Surprisingly, it's been all right. So far it just works. I'm using this on Mac OS.
If anybody's looking for an alternative that's one worth considering.
I'm still confused by why anyone wants to use either Docker or Podman desktops. The the docker/Podman CLIs seem like a much better way to interact with containers/images. Maybe it's just my usecase.
I can't speak to docker, but the Podman desktop UI on MacOS doesn't really offer any functionality that the CLI doesn't. It's more like a status dashboard than anything else. I personally never look at it. I don't see how you can get very far managing containers, images, etc using _just_ the UI in any case.
Agreed. To be honest I feel the same way about k8s. A bunch of people on my team get grumpy if we don't have k9s available or some other interface, but I prefer to just use kubectl
OrbStack is a very compelling alternative on macOS. The GUI launches instantly due to being a Swift app and not Electron. Container filesystems are visible in Finder. You can spin up full-blown VMs with it (only Linux ones though). Storage is managed dynamically, so you don't have to reserve or resize the virtual disk. Free for personal use, with zero nags or upsells.
I use good old `docker compose`. It's 100% compatible, since it uses the same moby engine underneath. I've also run k3d on it, so I'm pretty sure it'll handle anything you throw at it.
What sort of compatibility issues were you encountering? (disclaimer: I'm on the Podman Desktop team)
If it was compose + docker compatibility issues, that's on the roadmap for improvement :). Compose support is flakey at times (it's essentially a wrapper around the open source binary https://github.com/docker/compose)
The most common one I run into is with volumes, when the full path doesn't already exist. Docker will just make the path, Podman throws an error. It's been called a "bug" in docker but the fact is everyone just expects the paths to be created. I want it to just work, not make everyone in the industry redo their dockerfiles to be "correct."
It looks like there was some work done to resolve this in 2023 and 2024 but I know this was still happening for me in mid 2025. Podman is technically correct here but functionally broken in a way that keeps pushing me away because I don't have time to deal with that :(
Also, there’s Podman’s decision to drop CNI support. Sure, I get that they want to support the full stack, but netavark is really not especially capable, and CNI allows all kinds of interesting (and frequently overcomplicated) things.
I had issues with performance/power management, and had to abandon Podman Desktop on Windows. Have not checked out recently, but my issues may possibly be solved by
Basically I had a 5 second periodic CPU spike after some update. Also I had some compose issues, and some issue with Fedora based WSL. These together were blockers for me at that point, but I'm using podman on my pet Fedora server, and it works (using quadlets there) perfectly there, and will retry it on Windows also when I get the time.
Docker Engine (the "CLI") only works on Linux. "Desktop" is supposed to offer a unified experience across platforms, it offers a GUI, ships Docker Engine inside a virtual machine so that it works on Windows and MacOS, and tries to make the VM as transparent/invisible as possible (with varying success) with filesystem mounts and network configuration.
Another alternative (although Mac OS-only) is [0] OrbStack. Some devs in my team are running it as a more performant alternative to Docker Desktop for Mac and they are very happy so far.
I love podman. it’s my default whenever i need to run containers locally. Ive also used it to run containerized systemd services.
Selling enterprise licenses is a smart move from Redhat: they actually build/contribute to production grade container orchestration platforms like openshift. Unlike Docker Inc which looks like it only has the docker registry and Docker Desktop.
Man, I feel bad for Docker, the company. Created the open source project that almost single-handely revolutionized deployments, development environments, and cloud computing, but sorta never managed to stick a product.
I'm equally shocked nobody has bought them out to keep them well funded and not focused on trying to monetize (outside of just billing for private images). Every cloud provider like CloudFlare (I think?), Azure, AWS, GCP, etc benefit from Docker, it seems like a no brainer to me... You would then condense the org to just developers and PMs. Then marketing and other employees could be shifted to another part of the parent org and condense it down to a core group that builds and makes the tooling stronger.
I wish we had tax exceptions for companies maintaining open-source projects full time to be reasonable write offs or something, with strict checks so companies dont just make random "open source" projects to write off, it should be something with known sizable impact and/or use, it would make some critical open source projects attractive "buy outs" or options to fully fund for some of these giants that benefit from them. Imagine if the devs entire salary (up to a point) could be written off completely. Some of these people are working on key infrastructure for the modern web, and even other critical systems, think of Chromium (tricky because of Chrome being not-open source but a proprietary end-product), Firefox, Linux, openssl, and obviously Docker, as good example.
How ? Docker didn't invent the underlying technology and can't control it (through patents, etc...). It's all open and Docker tools are just the most popular but there are alternatives. Why pay when you can get it for free ?
I personally prefer the Podman CLI however as you don't need the daemon running in the background and prefer Kubernetes like yamls for local development. I definitely don't need a polished desktop GUI that shows me how many images I have though - I've never understood the use case for that.
My Podman starts containers in arch x86-64-v3 with rosetta on for 27 seconds which Docker does it in 9s. I wonder what's wrong. I've already upgraded Mac to Tahoe (which has x86-64-v3 support included into rosetta)
There is definitely something wrong with your setup. I can run an amd64 container on my Macbook Pro M3 in well under a second:
[~]$ podman pull --arch=amd64 debian:13
Resolved "debian" as an alias (/etc/containers/registries.conf.d/000-shortnames.conf)
Trying to pull docker.io/library/debian:13...
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob sha256:866771c43bf5eb77362eeeb163c0c825e194c2806d0b697028434e3b9c02f59d
Copying config sha256:a3624ddeb711bef28c29e6de1502fc3ef9df132c220d1db5a121b2a1e2a74256
Writing manifest to image destination
a3624ddeb711bef28c29e6de1502fc3ef9df132c220d1db5a121b2a1e2a74256
[~]$ time podman run --rm -ti debian:13 uname -m
WARNING: image platform (linux/amd64) does not match the expected platform (linux/arm64)
x86_64
podman run --rm -ti debian:13 uname -m 0.03s user 0.02s system 9% cpu 0.456 total
No I checked it against the amount of RAM. Podman with 8GB does not increase speed, Docker with 4GB is still 9s
podman run 27->24
docker run 9.4->9.769 total
(I increased limit in podman and decreased limit in docker). This happens with amd64 arch images (which I for some reason need in my work and cannot rebuild)
now I'm curious why it's still slow even with the increase of ram + cpu, I'll sync up with the podman core team why it's benchmarking much faster in docker vs podman (assuming both are using rosetta 2 on your machine)
I switched to Colima instead and couldn't be happier.
”—mount $HOME:w”
I really really want an alternative to docker desktop. I don't like the path they're going down. I don't like the AI crap in the UI. The licensing is crazy. It just doesn't feel right.
So I've been lately using rancher by SuSE. Surprisingly, it's been all right. So far it just works. I'm using this on Mac OS.
If anybody's looking for an alternative that's one worth considering.
If it was compose + docker compatibility issues, that's on the roadmap for improvement :). Compose support is flakey at times (it's essentially a wrapper around the open source binary https://github.com/docker/compose)
https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/6234
It looks like there was some work done to resolve this in 2023 and 2024 but I know this was still happening for me in mid 2025. Podman is technically correct here but functionally broken in a way that keeps pushing me away because I don't have time to deal with that :(
https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/6460
Also, there’s Podman’s decision to drop CNI support. Sure, I get that they want to support the full stack, but netavark is really not especially capable, and CNI allows all kinds of interesting (and frequently overcomplicated) things.
https://github.com/podman-desktop/podman-desktop/issues/1035...
Basically I had a 5 second periodic CPU spike after some update. Also I had some compose issues, and some issue with Fedora based WSL. These together were blockers for me at that point, but I'm using podman on my pet Fedora server, and it works (using quadlets there) perfectly there, and will retry it on Windows also when I get the time.
[0]: https://orbstack.dev
Selling enterprise licenses is a smart move from Redhat: they actually build/contribute to production grade container orchestration platforms like openshift. Unlike Docker Inc which looks like it only has the docker registry and Docker Desktop.
I wish we had tax exceptions for companies maintaining open-source projects full time to be reasonable write offs or something, with strict checks so companies dont just make random "open source" projects to write off, it should be something with known sizable impact and/or use, it would make some critical open source projects attractive "buy outs" or options to fully fund for some of these giants that benefit from them. Imagine if the devs entire salary (up to a point) could be written off completely. Some of these people are working on key infrastructure for the modern web, and even other critical systems, think of Chromium (tricky because of Chrome being not-open source but a proprietary end-product), Firefox, Linux, openssl, and obviously Docker, as good example.
How ? Docker didn't invent the underlying technology and can't control it (through patents, etc...). It's all open and Docker tools are just the most popular but there are alternatives. Why pay when you can get it for free ?
Are there any material differences between this and the free OSS Podman Desktop[1] released 4 years ago?
0: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-build-pod... 1: https://podman-desktop.io/
Podman Desktop by default has a much lower RAM (4GB) + CPU usage (50% CPU). That's something that could be improved... I've opened up an issue: https://github.com/podman-desktop/podman-desktop/issues/1634... :)
Because podman doesn't work as well as docker.