Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

The main problem, I think, with Windows containers is that they are only really supported on Windows Server - which most developers don't have access to.

You can run them through Docker Desktop, but then why not just run the same containers you will be deploying on you server (which is most likely going to be linux based?).

I would love for MS to make containers the way to deploy programs to Windows, but that requires them to make the runtime part of the default install and to make it available on all the OSs.

View on HN

Windows containers can be built on Windows 10 pro and windows 11 pro. All you need is the hypervisor from Microsoft installed under windows Settings->Apps and Features->Additional windows features.

Windows 2022 containers work on Windows 11. Docker Desktop uses a shim for Windows containers. “dockerd” a single binary for Windows statically compiled is all you need to run Windows containers with the familiar Docker commands, you could also use PowerShell.

They are supported all the same. IMO the main issue is that this feature is poorly marketed.

Its extremely poorly marketed, since I looked up the MS documentation when I wrote that comment and it only still only said windows server.

Still unless it works on Win10 home, it won't be the default way to install software for windows - which sucks, since its a better way than the current one.

Software delivered via Windows store, specially if packaged with MSIX already uses containers.

Windows containers are supported in Windows Professional as well.

Maybe it is because I spend most of my time as Windows developer, this wasn't hard to find,

> One physical computer system running Windows 10 or 11 Professional or Enterprise with Anniversary Update (version 1607) or later.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscont...

It does further down say that you need a windows server even for development purposes.

What I missed was that it only applied to windows server images.

Also the exception only seems to apply for development and testing services and, for some reason, only a physical computer.

Regardless, I was clearly wrong: it is possible, just not well documented.

Isn't this still the Windows Server images only? Can I expect everything to run that would run on win 10, 11 and/or server?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com