[KronisLV]

> Can't speak for anyone else, but my company is migrating away from Docker Desktop to Rancher in order to save money.

Their Rancher Desktop offering seems to be promising: https://rancherdesktop.io/

Much the same way how Podman Desktop seems nice: https://podman-desktop.io/

Though personally, Docker has always been a safe bet (both the desktop software, as well as the container runtime), I think I'll stick with it for a few years and let others take the early adopter risks, and use the alternatives when they've been more battle tested.

[v3ss0n]

Why there are needs to use docker GUIs? Docker compose and lazy docker is all I need for managing over 80 docker containers , both dev and production

https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker

[KronisLV]

> Why there are needs to use docker GUIs?

Because to some people using GUIs are more approachable and in some case objectively better (e.g. telling the state of things at a glance and efficiently using screen real estate, with graphs and whatnot), whereas the ways they're worse in might not dealbreakers (e.g. lack of automation, given that there can still be APIs or access to the underlying cluster anyways).

For an example of this, see pieces of software that one can use to manage orchestrators (essentially one step further than just running individual containers, but a good example of how UIs can be useful):

- Portainer: https://www.portainer.io/

- Rancher: https://www.rancher.com/products/rancher

Some orchestrators even include dashboards on their own:

- Kubernetes dashboard: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/...

- Nomad web UI: https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/web-ui

And some of that applies to running regular containers and managing them locally: for many it can be useful to be able to just click around to discover more details about a container, as well as what's using storage and so on. Thankfully the CLIs of Docker and competing runtimes are pretty well structured as they are, but I guess it's just a different type of UX.

At the end of the day, what works for you, or even what you find comfortable to use, might not be the case for someone else and vice versa. It's definitely nice to have that choice in the first place, and to know the various options out there.

[v3ss0n]

I tried portainer , aweful UX experience and all good features are inside paid version .

I gotta try Nomad. I am planning to try Rancher too.

Lazydocker UX is much superior , can do all the things fast and neat , it is Terminal UI with tmux like key flows , and allows clicking items, so can be said GUI and much better UX experience. Give a try!.

[KronisLV]

> I tried portainer, awful UX experience and all good features are inside paid version.

This is interesting to me, because it doesn't quite match my experience - I've been using Portainer for around 3 years at this point and it's been pretty decent.

The worst issues that I've gotten is networking issues in some hybrid configurations with Docker Swarm (e.g. Portainer cannot reach the manager node of the cluster for a bit), or troubles configuring Traefik ingresses when managing Kubernetes (though I think the recent patch notes talked about improving the ingress section, so maybe the experience will get better with non-Nginx ingresses).

Other than that, it's been great for onboarding new people, illustrating the cluster state at a glance, easily operating with stacks and scaling/restarting services as needed, including pulling new images, viewing the logs or even connecting to containers through a web UI if need be. The webhook functionality in particular is really nice - you can just do a curl request against a given URL and that will pull the new container versions for the given image and do a redeploy, which works nicely with a variety of CI solutions.

When I last tried, initializing Nomad clusters with networking encryption was a bit less of a smooth experience (needing to essentially manage your own PKI) and the web UI felt more like a dashboard, instead of something that you could click around in, if you're a proponent of that workflow.

Rancher is probably better than both of those options, though there's a certain overhead in regards to running both that software and a full Kubernetes cluster. If Kubernetes feels like a good fit for a particular project and resources aren't an issue, definitely check it out! You can, of course, also have some success with lightweight clusters, like K3s: https://k3s.io/

I'll definitely agree that Lazydocker is a nice tool, but I wouldn't call it superior, just different (TUI vs GUI), their demo video is nice though: https://youtu.be/NICqQPxwJWw

It actually reminds me of ctop, which you might also want to check out, though it's not something that you'd manage clusters in, merely the individual containers on a node (which won't always be enough, same as Docker Compose isn't): https://github.com/bcicen/ctop

Regardless, for Kubernetes, I'm inclined to say that you'd enjoy k9s a bunch then, it has a similar TUI approach: https://k9scli.io/