[vmception]

Now come on Windows! Give me a solution for that (although I rarely use it) and I’m sold

or maybe I moved the goal post to requiring more than 16gb RAM again

but come on everyone you can do it!

edit: guys I'm talking about running Windows on a VM on a M1 macbook. Just going down the checkbox of virtualization options. Docker is one checkbox. Now want Windows and Vmware/VirtualBox/Parallels

[gmaster1440]

The WSL 2 version of Docker is a very fast and solid experience for Windows users.

[symlinkk]

Isn’t WSL2 just a VM? No more special kernel subsystem trickery? In that case it should be almost exactly the same as the macOS version of Docker.

[pjmlp]

Yes, but Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, WSL runs alongside Windows, not on top of it.

Plus Windows also has containers, Docker is only using WSL for Linux images, Windows containers are used for Windows images.

And on Windows Server the containers can run directly on top of Hyper-V as well.

[johnnycerberus]

We had painful experiences with Windows containers, from being incapable to run CUDA through it to solutions that are not battle-tested and an ecosystem that is not as matured as the Linux one.

[cpuguy83]

Except hyper-v is a very mature hypervisor, and supports thing like dynamic memory allocation for VM's.

[nickjj]

I run WSL 2 here with Docker Desktop and it's really good. It has been since WSL 2 was available.

As for 16GB of memory, funny enough I just put out a video today around the topic of "is 16GB of RAM enough for web development?" over at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQS7XCgUPmc

The video demos running everything I run in my day to day plus more just to see how far 16GB of RAM really goes. It's all running on a Windows 10 workstation I put together in 2014 which has a weak CPU and video card from today's standards, yet everything runs really smoothly.

I never broke 13GB of memory used even with running VMs separate from Docker and heavy duty video editing tools, all while recording a 1080p video at the same time.

For folks who want an M1 and are capped at 16gb of memory, I would imagine the memory usage experience would be similar to that Windows based video. Good enough for most web development, even with a moderate amount of media creation and ops work.

[AntiImperialist]

Do you mean the arm version of Windows which runs on Surface Pro X? That can be virtualized.

If you mean the regular x86_64 version of Windows, forget it.

Docker Desktop uses qemu, which is the only way you can run an x86_64 OS on an arm64 machine. It can be usable for Linux kernel and command-line applications.

But for Windows, it is very likely that it will be too slow to be usable. People have tried running Windows XP on Raspberry PIs successfully, but it is very slow as expected. https://youtu.be/QQOP29yLOxQ