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My experience using docker on windows has been pretty awful, it would randomly become completely unresponsive, sometimes taking 100% CPU in the process. Couldn't stop it without restarting my computer. Tried reinstalling and various things, still no help. Only found a GitHub issue with hundreds of comments but no working workarounds/solutions.
When it does work it still manages to feel... fragile, although maybe that's just because of my experience with it breaking.
You can cap the amount of cpu/memory docker is allowed to use. That helps a lot for those issues in my experience, although it still takes somewhat beefy machines to run docker in wsl
I found the same thing until I started strictly controlling the resources each container could consume, and also changing to a much beefier machine. Running a single project with a few images were fine, but more than that and the WSL connection would randomly crash or become unresponsive.
Databases in particular you need to watch: left unchecked they will absolutely hog RAM.
I work in a windows environment at work and my VMs regularly flag the infrastructure firewalls. So WSL is my easiest way to at least be able to partially work in my environment of choice.
One of the best changes I made at my company was getting everyone to be on a dockerised environment. Prior to this there were a host of issues between the windows and mac users. WSL is awesome.
Try limiting it down to 2GB (there is an option in the Docker Desktop app). Before I discovered this option, the VM was normally eating 3-4GB of my memory.
This was one of the reasons we switched to docker in the first place. Our Devs with M series processors spent weeks detangling issues with libraries that weren't compatible.
Just started using Docker and all of those issues went away
The difference between Docker and a VM is that Docker shares a kernel, but provides isolated processes and filesystems. macOS has a very distinct kernel from Linux (hence why Docker on macOS uses a Linux VM), I would be shocked if it could run on a Linux Docker host. Maybe you were running macOS in a VM?
Think of a container like a self contained box that can be configured to contain everything a program may need to run.
You can give the box to someone else, and they can use it on their computer without any issues.
So I could build a container that contains my program that hosts cat pictures and give it to you. As long as you have docker installed you can run a command "docker run container X" and it'll run.
VirtualBox: A virtual machine created with VirtualBox contains simulated hardware, an installed OS, and installed applications. If you want multiple VMs, you need to simulate all of that for each.
Docker containers virtualize the application, but use their host's hardware and kernel without simulating it. This makes containers smaller and lighter.
VMs are good if you care about the hardware and the OS, for example to create different testing environments. Containers are good if you want to run many in parallel, for example to provide services on a server. Because they are lightweight, it's also easy to share containers. You can choose from a wide range of preconfigured containers, and directly use them or customize them to your liking.
A container is a binary blob that contains everything your application needs to run. All files, dependencies, other applications etc.
Unlike a VM which abstracts the whole OS a container abstracts only your app.
It uses path manipulation and namespaces to isolate your application so it can't access anything outside of itself.
So essentially you have one copy of an OS rather than running multiple OS's.
It uses way less resources than a VM.
As everything is contained in the image if it works on your machine it should work the same on any. Obviously networking and things like that can break it.