What does HackerNews think of kitematic?

Yeah, You need Hyper-V to run basic Docker configuration on Windows, I just simplified this too much I guess.

The end result is that if you run Docker on Windows with Hyper-V alone it's using Window filesystem and then "translating" this for Docker therefore making the whole process of accessing the files incredibly slow.

I used to work with docker using Docker Kinematic (https://github.com/docker/kitematic) in the past, which basically was a Virtual box with Docker installed inside this VM, and since the VM was some kind of Linux, it worked reasonably well.

The same seems to be the case when using WSL2 - you run VM and Docker inside this VM, removing the file sync/translation part out of the equation, resulting in speed boots.

Docker Desktop is just closed source fork of abandoned kitematic. https://github.com/docker/kitematic

You can also run regular docker with vagrant instead of Docker Desktop. This seems to be the way you can replace Docker Desktop with Podman: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/replace-docker-podman-macos

There was Kitematic for Docker, I think it was independent, but it's owned by Docker now and they shut it down. https://github.com/docker/kitematic