Docker Desktop was using about 4GB of RAM idling on my machine. That's the number that finally made me look for an alternative. But it wasn't the only problem.
The licensing situation changed in 2022 and is worth knowing about if you're a developer at a company with more than 250 employees or over $10M in revenue — Docker Desktop requires a paid subscription in that case. I was already in the habit of running it before my employer was technically required to pay for it, and that created a compliance question I'd rather not have.
The Replacement Stack
I've been running colima as the container runtime and nerdctl as the Docker CLI replacement for six months. On macOS, colima runs a lightweight Linux VM under the hood using Lima.
brew install colima nerdctl
colima start --cpu 4 --memory 8 --disk 60
# nerdctl is drop-in compatible for most commands
alias docker="nerdctl"Memory usage at idle: around 800MB. That's a real improvement. CPU is comparable when actually doing work — the overhead isn't in the runtime, it was in the Desktop application layer.
What Works Fine
Building images, running containers, docker-compose (via nerdctl compose), volume mounts, port forwarding — all of this works and the command syntax is identical. I've been using this setup on three projects with no issues from the container workflow itself.
The VM startup is slower than Docker Desktop's background daemon approach, but it's a one-time cost per session. I start colima in my shell login profile and it's running by the time I'm actually doing work.
What's Still Missing
The Docker Desktop GUI. I use it rarely, but I use it — primarily for inspecting container logs and looking at layer sizes for images I'm debugging. The replacement is lazydocker in the terminal, which I actually prefer for most things, but it's a real gap if you're used to the visual interface.
BuildKit features are sometimes inconsistent. I've hit edge cases with multi-platform builds that required going back to actual Docker CLI on a CI machine. For local development this hasn't mattered.
The Honest Verdict
If you're a developer on macOS and you're paying for Docker Desktop — or your employer is — this is worth the two hours it takes to set up and adjust. If you have a specific need for Docker Desktop features (the Extensions ecosystem, the Kubernetes integration, the GUI dashboard), the calculus is different.
For my workload, it's been better. Simpler, lighter, and not something I think about anymore.