Overview
Rancher Desktop is an open-source application by SUSE that provides a local Kubernetes and container management platform for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Built on Electron, it wraps tools like k3s (a lightweight Kubernetes distribution), Docker, and nerdctl. It uses a virtual machine on macOS and Linux, and WSL2 on Windows, to run containerd or Docker and Kubernetes. Users can choose their preferred container engine (Docker or containerd) and Kubernetes version, configure system resources, and manage container images through a GUI. Rancher Desktop allows seamless Kubernetes upgrades and integration with popular IDEs and cloud-native tools, streamlining container-based development workflows and eliminating the need to manage CLI tools separately.