It’s sluggish, it’s incredibly bloated with all the services that Docker (the company) wants to sell you and the UI is badly designed.
OrbStack is my go-to when it comes to running docker on Mac. It also uses macOS native containerization APIs so containers will be a bit more performant than they would (at least use to) be on Docker Desktop.
Another good approach if you’re fine without a GUI or want to bring your own is just ‚brew install docker‘.
The main gotcha I encountered with orbstack was with pulling down internally built amd64 images and trying to run them on apple silicon. I just remember constantly running into issues and going back to docker desktop as a result, even if their solution is janky in its own way.
OrbStack is my go-to when it comes to running docker on Mac. It also uses macOS native containerization APIs so containers will be a bit more performant than they would (at least use to) be on Docker Desktop.
Another good approach if you’re fine without a GUI or want to bring your own is just ‚brew install docker‘.