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Comment by saghul | Hacker News Reader

Is there a Docker Desktop for Linux? I don't see one here https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop (the Linux link takes you to Docker Engine).

The article presents "Docker Desktop Alternatives", then says "Minikube requires a VM. False" but it looks like on the platforms being compared here (macOS and Windows, since Docker Desktop is only available there) it does use a VM.

Did I get this wrong?

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I think the author was speaking generally about Minikube, not specifically as a Docker Desktop replacement here. Minikube can also be installed on Linux and doesn't require a VM in that environment. On Mac and Windows, it does of course require a VM, just as Docker does.

No, not wrong. Any non-Linux system that runs a Linux container will need to run a Linux kernel for that container. This is most often done with a VM even if that VM is obfuscated behind an application like Docker Desktop. This is why WSL 1 is often not supported by such systems even through you can run an "Ubuntu" application within WSL 1.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-version...

> Any non-Linux system that runs a Linux container will need to run a Linux kernel for that container.

Well, actually...

WSL 1, Illumos/SmartOS/OmniOS's LX-branded zones [1], and FreeBSD's Linux Jails [2] all work without a Linux kernel by translating syscalls.

This is somewhat analogous to how Wine can run Windows programs without a Windows kernel.

Last time I was paying attention to it, Joyent's Triton product provided a Docker API-compatible interface to run Docker containers on their SmartOS-based servers. Looks like that may still be around.[3]

  1. https://wiki.smartos.org/lx-branded-zones/
  2. https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator
  3. https://www.joyent.com/triton/compute

Thank you for the "well actually." I generally feel discomfort at blanket statements and often hedge things a bit. This often makes sentences longer and harder to read. This "well actually" did a great job of outlining the corner cases where syscall translation "works," and there aren't many. I'm glad I wasn't totally deluded.

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