Docker reveals why its virtual machine isn't yet on Apple Silicon M1
Despite Docker being mentioned by Apple at the original Apple Silicon launch, there remain many steps needed to get it working on M1 machines -- but the company is working on it.
Credit: Apple
Apple knew that one concern about the move away from Intel was the impact on virtual PCs, so it made a point of mentioning one of them during the presentation. Now the makers of that software, Docker, confirm that is going to run on Apple Silicon, but says there are still several hurdles.
"Docker was excited to see new Macs feature Apple silicon and their M1 chip," said developer Ben De St Paer-Gotch in a blog post. "Our goal at Docker is to provide the same great experience on the new Macs as we do today for our millions of users on Docker Desktop for Mac, and to make this transition as seamless as possible."
"Building the right experience for our customers means getting quite a few things right before we push a release," he continues. "Although Apple has released Rosetta 2 to help move applications over to the new M1 chips, this does not get us all the way with Docker Desktop."
De St Paer-Gotch says that Apple's changes mean the company needs to move its "plumbing" to Apple's new hypervisor framework. And it also relies on software from other companies which are similarly still working to adapt to Apple Silicon.
"We rely on things like Go for the backend of Docker Desktop and Electron for the Docker Dashboard to view your Desktop content," he continued. "We know these projects are hard at work getting ready for M1 chips, and we are watching them closely."
The update from Docker comes after other virtualization software developers revealed their own plans. VMWare has similarly said that it will be bringing its software to the M1 Macs, but is "not quite ready to announce our timeline."
Parallels says that it has made "tremendous progress," and is "eager to try" the new app on M1 machines.
Credit: Apple
Apple knew that one concern about the move away from Intel was the impact on virtual PCs, so it made a point of mentioning one of them during the presentation. Now the makers of that software, Docker, confirm that is going to run on Apple Silicon, but says there are still several hurdles.
"Docker was excited to see new Macs feature Apple silicon and their M1 chip," said developer Ben De St Paer-Gotch in a blog post. "Our goal at Docker is to provide the same great experience on the new Macs as we do today for our millions of users on Docker Desktop for Mac, and to make this transition as seamless as possible."
"Building the right experience for our customers means getting quite a few things right before we push a release," he continues. "Although Apple has released Rosetta 2 to help move applications over to the new M1 chips, this does not get us all the way with Docker Desktop."
De St Paer-Gotch says that Apple's changes mean the company needs to move its "plumbing" to Apple's new hypervisor framework. And it also relies on software from other companies which are similarly still working to adapt to Apple Silicon.
"We rely on things like Go for the backend of Docker Desktop and Electron for the Docker Dashboard to view your Desktop content," he continued. "We know these projects are hard at work getting ready for M1 chips, and we are watching them closely."
The update from Docker comes after other virtualization software developers revealed their own plans. VMWare has similarly said that it will be bringing its software to the M1 Macs, but is "not quite ready to announce our timeline."
Parallels says that it has made "tremendous progress," and is "eager to try" the new app on M1 machines.
Comments
that said, I haven’t heard of any issues with Electron running on M1, I’m sure it’s the least of Docker’s concerns.
So what would you suggest as an alternative to Electron, that has good enough and has affordable development tools that run on both Mac and Windows (and ideally Linux) and can target rich-UI desktop apps on Mac, Window, and Linux? Xcode, Visual Studio for Mac, and Xamarin aren't targeting cross-platform desktop apps, Cordova is no better than Electron, Unity is too game centric, MonoDevelop is somewhat abandoned, and Qt is very expensive from a licensing standpoint. Yeah yeah, I know that C/C++ is effectively "universal" and platform agnostic at some level but that level does not include much of anything at the UI layer. For services and components that'll be deployed inside other containers or platform specific wrapper, I love C++, but good luck finding really good C++ programmers. Mediocre C++ programmers are a disaster.
So what's the plaque-free alternative to Electron? I'm not being facetious, I'm not in love with Electron either, but at least for personal/hobby projects (spending my own money) I haven't found other alternatives that meet the cross platform dev/deploy criteria and don't want to lock into proprietary toolsets or runtimes.
that being said m1 MacBook Pro out for delivery here in the Netherlands. Edit: I’ve been subscribed to the GitHub thread for homebrew and there’s tons of progress daily. You can expect all major stuff a pro web dev would use to be available very soon
The problem is when Electron is used for important, "mission-critical" stuff. I spend most of my day in Visual Studio Code and the remainder in Slack. The performance of particularly the latter is notoriously bad. All of the gains in CPU power over the past ten years (not just this new M1 stuff) thrown away, the advantages of UIKit and SwiftUI completely ignored. Even without an M1 processor my Mac should be unbelievably fast, instead it's blowing fans and chewing up the battery so I can run web apps.
Today I made the decision to move from VSCode to Panic’s Nova, incidentally. A breath of fresh air, a real Mac-assed app.
One last example — Authy, the multi-factor auth app. Not only were the folks at Twilio too lazy to make a native Mac version, they didn't even bother making a desktop UI. It's just the iPhone UI running on the desktop. It's terrible. Fortunately I just learned that 1Password has an MFA feature that I somehow overlooked, so I'm busy converting all my accounts over… but god, what a crap implementation of a fairly vital function.
No, I wouldn't even mention Electron or node.js on the same planet as Swift/UIKit/SwiftUI on the Mac or C#/.NET/WPF on Windows.
Hey, at least nobody is mentioning JavaFX ...