Docker Desktop is a development dependency, but you can also use Podman or minikube. I just use Podman these days, I prefer it. The container format is all standard these days, you don’t actually need anything Docker to use it. Fargate and Fly don’t even actually run the container directly, they convert it to a VM with Firecracker first.
Running containers make me feel like I need production hardware on my development machine. It's slow, clunky, and uses too much memory. I'd rather boot it up without docker.
