I don't have any links handy, but I bought a copy of Parallels, set up Ubuntu, and installed docker inside normally. On my host machine, I use the docker client (only the client, no engine) with DOCKER_HOST set to the VM's hostname. VSCode's Remote Container extension is capable of being set up this way, too, so I can attach it to a running container in the VM. It's definitely more work to set up than using Docker Desktop, but I found the performance improvement to be worth it.
Even docker desktop runs the same way i.e they are running docker on a linux VM. It's hidden from the user but that linux VM can be accessed.
For improving performance, you can enable some of the newer experimental features in latest docker (Virtualization Framework and VirtioFS). The combination works really well except for databases [1] due to the way FS sync is handled. To fix that a setting need to be changed in the linux VM that docker uses. [2]. Hopefully docker will make that a default setting in the future.
I can't speak to GP's claims about performance because I never used Docker Desktop, but I use lima [1] with colima [2] as my docker host. It's dead easy to set up: `brew install colima` followed by `colima start`.
https://multipass.run/docs/docker-tutorial
And I second the other commenter's recommendation of VSCode's Remote Container extension.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers
And possibly using Podman instead of Docker.
https://opensource.com/article/21/7/vs-code-remote-container...