[lenn0x]

I've been running multipass for awhile now to host Docker on macOS, especially on M1. I ended up writing a guide/docs on how to easily get it setup with cloud-init to replace Docker Desktop. Hope this helps anyone.

https://github.com/chrisgoffinet/docker-multipass

[watermelon0]

Did you notice any performance differences compared to Docker Desktop?

[lenn0x]

night and day. it's the reason I sought out something like multipass. I first started with a license for Parallels Desktop and noticed the disk performance to be way better. Once I came around to multipass, I ditched Parallels Desktop because I liked having cloud-init support, so all my workstations can easily spin that up when setting them up on a fresh-install or a new machine. I have my own dotfiles so automating all of that was a win. Also the auto-mounting of the home directory was a nice touch so I could bind volumes like Docker Desktop does out of the box for you. I would say if you aren't doing heavy i/o across binded volumes you might not notice. But for a client of mine I was having Docker do some large C++ compiles of a project that even after bumping up the cores + memory of Docker Desktop, still felt slow. When trying Parallels Desktop and multipass it felt way snappier and compile times were heavily reduced.