From the end of January 2022, an Enterprise License is required to use Docker Desktop. It remains free for small businesses (fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in annual revenue), personal use, education, and non-commercial open source projects.

As an alternative I looked at using Podman on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.

Setting up WSL 2

• Install WSL 2
  • Open cmd as Administrator
  • Run wsl --install
  • Restart Windows
• Install a Linux Distro
  • Open cmd as Administrator
  • Run wsl --install -d Ubuntu to install Ubuntu LTS
  • Restart Windows

Installing Podman

• Add a Repositories which has Podman available
  • If you are using Ubuntu 20.10 or newer Podman is available in the official repositories. And skip to the next part of adding a repository to find Podman.
  • If you are running 20.04 (current LTS), or newer run the below.
  • Open an Ubuntu terminal window, and run the below.

    . /etc/os-release
    echo "deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/xUbuntu_${VERSION_ID}/ /" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable.list
    curl -L "https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/xUbuntu_${VERSION_ID}/Release.key" | sudo apt-key add -

• Install Podman
  • In an Ubuntu terminal, run the below

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get -y upgrade
    sudo apt-get -y install podman

Using Podman

Podman has a similar CLI to docker, so most, if not all, commands that you use in Docker are supported by Podman.

A full list of supported commands can be found on the Podman documentations