It's not great, at all. But at least on Mac it's a lot easier to get going with Docker for Mac than it is to roll your own with e.g. VirtualBox. I assume it's the same on Windows.

I just use whatever `brew install docker` gives me. They don't call that Docker Desktop, right? I thought that was some kind of GUI thing of theirs—I do all my dockering from the command line, which looks the same across Mac and Linux except when (rarely, these days) the virtualization the Mac implementation uses leaks through.

The key is the virtualization. I think (!) with `brew install docker` you've got to set up a VM and get Docker running inside it, yourself. Docker Desktop for Mac does that, and implements filesystem and networking integration for you.

Most people like the convenience of that, if not the performance or (now) the cost.

Closest I've come to having to manually set up anything with a simple `brew install docker` making sure my shell sets the env vars correctly. It automatically sets up the VM, and has since I started using it years ago.

(but, it's possible that what I'm using is also considered Docker Desktop—I just associated that term with their GUI thingy [and I think it includes some kind of sys tray widget?], which I've never used)

[EDIT] oh no you're kinda right, I think I recall having to run one command, post-install, on older versions, to set up the VM, though I don't think you still have to and that was all still handled for you, you just had to tell it to do it. `docker-machine create default` or something like that, was enough for 99% of use cases. Don't have to even do that, now, though, IIRC.