Rancher Desktop 2.0 is a ground-up rewrite, and the first build is ready for you to try. There is an alpha you can download today and run on your own machine.

The 2.0 alpha is out, and there are two ways to run it. Install the full desktop app, or skip the GUI and run the new rdd binary straight from your terminal. Both leave Rancher Desktop alone, and both put you a couple of commands from a working container engine.

In October 2020, Rancher Desktop was a tray icon and a single shell command. Click the icon, and it ran minikube start to bring up a Kubernetes cluster on your Mac. That was the whole thing: nine files, one good idea, and a note in the source that read, more or less, this is just a quick proof of concept.