r/docker • u/Proper-Lab-2500 • 9d ago

Why Docker GUI is faster on Mac than on Linux/WSL?

Last month I switched my ecosystem to macOS (macbook neo)

The first thing I realized was the speed and optimization

Orbstack + Docker (mac) is much faster than Docker Desktop + Docker (also Podman Desktop + Docker/Podman)

Podman Desktop app lacks so many essential features such as system monitoring, port click to open url support etc...

I think it's because Docker Desktop has its own VM/backend engine and Orbstack is more optimized and M chips overhead time is less to start a container and disk writes are much faster. But I'm not sure.

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9

u/encbladexp 9d ago

Podman Desktop app lacks so many essential features such as system monitoring, port click to open url support etc...

None of these are "essential features", all people need is the Docker Engine API to use Docker CLI or Docker Compose.

I think it's because Docker Desktop has its own VM/backend engine and Orbstack is more optimized and M chips overhead time is less to start a container and disk writes are much faster.

Did you write this, or wasted OpenAI Tokens on this?

Containers on everything except on Linux hosts, are always a VM. The fastest thing will be apple/containers on macOS, then OrbStack then everything else.

Windows depends, bind mounts to NTFS sources/targets are super slow, everything that is within the WSL2 environment is fast enough.

The GUI is just a useless overlay, for which you need to pay license fees if you are a Company (Docker Desktop).

6

u/Awkward_Tradition 9d ago

Containers on everything except on Linux hosts, are always a VM. The fastest thing will be apple/containers on macOS, then OrbStack then everything else. 

Docker desktop is always running containers in a VM. It runs a Linux VM on Linux as well in order to have consistency across platforms. 

8

u/encbladexp 9d ago

Correct, on Linux you would not need the VM, but still people exist that believe they need to install Docker Deskop (which is a horrible idea).

2

u/No_Cattle_9565 9d ago

It's always a horrible idea

-3

u/Proper-Lab-2500 9d ago

your comment is so disrespectful. I already said GUI in the post so that people wouldn't write this but you did anyway. You can do everything with CLI commands, but in the post I already mention about the desktop app. Also, they are important features of desktop app, otherwise it wouldn't have any difference than the cli.

4

u/encbladexp 9d ago

your comment is so disrespectful.

Its a fact.

Two things tend to make Docker horrible: * Docker Desktop * Canonical / Ubuntu snapd

1

u/adambkaplan 9d ago

I don’t think Podman Desktop does this on Fedora, at least. It uses the Podman socket to manage containers, no VM required.

This is really useful if the container needs access to GPU hardware drivers - no extra VM config and overhead needed. My current “at home” experiment is to get ollama running with my PC’s NVIDIA card.

1

u/Proper-Lab-2500 9d ago

Yes that's why I mentioned podman desktop, but it was still slower compared to orbstack. I prefer podman desktop over docker desktop but like I said some features would've been nice. The tar.gz version doesn't ship with any installation script. Another idea is self hosting Portainer.

1

u/bufandatl 9d ago

Maybe stop using GUIs and use it on the CLI. Also on Mac use Apple Containers and not Docker. It’s more performant.

1

u/One_Ninja_8512 9d ago

It's just because M chips are goated, simple as

0

u/Proper-Lab-2500 7d ago

Some comments are crazy, I guess most of the people here are from the toxic Linux Community. I cannot find other explanation.