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5 Awesome Docker Tools To Make Your Life Easier

Jonas Scholz on November 12, 2024

Hey there! 👋 Working with Docker can sometimes be a pain, but these are some tools that make it so much easier. I've tried dozens of Docker tools o...
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Douglas Fugazi

Everyone is missing Podman, the best free & open source container tools: podman.io
it works on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
To me, it is a game-changing.

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Valdinei dos Santos

I switched to Podman and haven't had any bad experiences.

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Jonas Scholz

Thank you for sharing:)

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Pierre-Henry Soria ✨

I've been using Podman since 2022 😄 Great one

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Jonas Scholz

Yeah Podman is also good, they should probably do a bit more marketing:)

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Jordan

Why not help them out and add podman to this list ;)

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Jonas Scholz

Haha, maybe next one:D I suggested orbstack because I personally used it

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Jordan

You can always add a section called "Other", missed better-docker-ps

github.com/Mikescher/better-docker-ps

Unless this was just to get the word out on sliplane, any thoughts on bring your own server in the future?

PS. Your blog sliplane.io/blog/5-awesome-docker-... has "invalid date"

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Jonas Scholz

I added podman as another alternative to the Orbstack section!

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Thesi

Orbstack is especially nice if you have <16gb of memory! Docker Desktop is crazy resource hungry

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Lukas Mauser

Good one! I shy away nowadays from using Docker desktop since it pretty reliably crashes my system 🫠

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Pierre-Henry Soria ✨

Have you gotten the chance to try Orbstack, Luke?

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Mohammad Jawad (Kasir) Barati

Raising one concern. With all these toolings I am afraid we might loss touch with the real basic skill which containers and their native language. Like SQL, with all those ORMs I lost touch with it. And now I am trying to get back to where I was. Just food for thoughts.

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Jonas Scholz

Mostly agree, I think everybody should at least try to deploy something without a PaaS once. I don't agree in regards to OrbStack, Dive etc.

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Sebastian Fritsch

What's the problem with Docker Desktop? The last features are amazing, in Builds you have a lot of insights about your build docker image and see all logs, cache, status, build time and more 🐳

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Jonas Scholz

Docker Desktop needs 5GB of memory when idling on my laptop, I just think thats crazy. Unusable if you only have 8GB of memory
Memory Usage

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Andrey Mavlyanov • Edited

actually it's fine since most of the memory here is a vm running gnu/linux distribution. cause 'docker' (read: containers is a capability of a Linux Kernel). you can not run 'docker' on a win or mac without running linux machine somewhere (this could be you lap or you lab machine, but somewhere you need to run linux kernel and related stuff. that's the basics).

the problem with docker desktop is a licence, not the amount of resource it uses.

btw, I don't actually use docker desktop on my Mac, prefer Colima, but I suppose there might be some setting to lower the memory usage of a GNU/Linux machine running under the hood of the docker desktop.

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Jonas Scholz

I know how docker works, but how is this not a problem anyway? Will have to hceck out Colima!

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Octo

+1 on Colima. Specially if you're on an ARM64 Mac.

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Jonas Scholz

Interesting, didn't know Colima before. Thanks for sharing!

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Sebastian Fritsch

Got ya! I've got M3 Macbook Pro with 16 GB memory and my next one will be definitely 32 GB! 🔥

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Jonas Scholz

Yea i'm also on a M2 Macbook Pro with 16 GB memory and I'm struggling lol, next one def. 32 GB :D

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shroomlife 🍄 • Edited

Sliplane is just a very expensive middle-man for hetzner.de cloud servers. Ah I see the author is also from there. This is a hidden commercial...

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Jonas Scholz

Vercel is just a very expensive middle-man for AWS. Fine if you think that, most don’t.

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Jonas Scholz

To be fair, I'm not hiding that I am the co-founder. It's literally in the first sentence.

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noreuzis • Edited

I'm using the community edition of Portainer, and it's been seamless so far! If you're short on time and not focused on DevOps tasks/area, it's very helpful.

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Jonas Scholz

Nice! I think I really need to give portainer another try:)

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Arnaud Delante

For lazydocker, if you install it through Homebrew, you don't need to launch it with Docker as you imply, you can just run lazydocker in your terminal

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Jonas Scholz

Oh yeah, true! Will fix that, thank you:)

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Antoine Raymond

Sliplane is interesting, I will give it a try

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Jonas Scholz

Thank you:)

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Pierre-Henry Soria ✨

Great share! 👌

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Jonas Scholz

Thanks:)

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Pierre-Henry Soria ✨

Orbstack.dev is amazing tbh. And so much faster to start than Docker desktop!

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Pierre-Henry Soria ✨

Orbstack.dev is amazing tbh. And so much faster to start

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Mahender Kumar

Very productive info

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Jonas Scholz

Thank you:)

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Ajay Kulkarni

Thanks for the list with details. Definitely will try sliplane.
Rancher Desktop is what I'm using now on my Mac

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Jonas Scholz

Rancher Desktop also looks pretty good! Why are you using it over Docker Desktop?:)

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Doug Wilson

Nice list and summaries! Thank you!

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Jonas Scholz

Thank you for reading:)

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Héctor Serrano

Jonas thank you very much.

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Jonas Scholz

Thank you for reading:)

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Help.center

Very helpful!

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Jonas Scholz

Thank you!:)