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by koito17 637 days ago
Looks cool, but how is the Kubernetes support? One of the major reasons we use Docker Desktop at work is to host a local Kubernetes cluster with services deployed there. We also support Rancher Desktop since it uses k3s, and k3s is arguably a nicer Kubernetes distribution than the one set up by Docker Desktop.

With that said, I have recently tried OrbStack, and it is able to start up near instantly, while Kubernetes spends at most 2 seconds to start up. The UI is minimal, but it offers just enough to inspect containers, pods, services, logs, etc. It also is very lightweight on memory usage and battery. I personally cannot return to either Docker or Rancher Desktop after having tried OrbStack.

OrbStack also allows using Kubernetes service domains directly on the host. So no need to use kubectl port-forward, and applications running on the host can use identical configuration to what's inside the Kubernetes cluster.

The battery savings, dynamic memory usage, fast startup time, and QOL of OrbStack is pretty much my standard for a Docker Desktop alternative. I am not sure if container-desktop satisfies all of these requirements. (Rancher Desktop certainly doesn't)

3 comments

+1 for OrbStack, it’s one of the few software subscriptions I pay for, and is worth every penny. Leagues head of Docker Desktop.
I demoed Orbstack to my whole department of 100+ engineers, now we've canceled our Docker Desktop account and switched everyone over. Zero complaints.
I'm torn between https://k0sproject.io and https://k3s.io to use in CI and production.

Any suggestions or personal experience?

I'm a fan of k3s. Mostly because Rancher Desktop, but there are more useful features, like a full k3s distribution within a single docker container. It includes some nice QoL features, like pre-loading images from a mounted folder. Great for CI.
k0s is especially easy to deploy thanks to k0sctl, whether it's single node clusters, or multi node clusters. I haven't looked back ever since I started using it.
I love kind! Used it a lot when I was writing my thesis on Kubernetes schedulers.
Curious to see your thesis!
It's not much, just a simple bachelor thesis https://repositorio.ufsc.br/bitstream/handle/123456789/24495....

I mostly wanted to provide a software/hardware playground for my advisors who were working on their own thesis about algorithms for energy-aware IoT edge deployments.

The TLDR is that you can write algorithms to minimize various parameters within a Kubernetes cluster, like energy consumption.

Literally or figuratively?
What about minikube?
Minikube is more for dev environments than prod. So k0s over it anytime. For dev envs, I adopted KinD, I can even run it in CI for tests.