Rancher Desktop 2.0 is a full rewrite, and the first build is ready for you to try. There's 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. You can install the full desktop app, or you can skip the GUI and run the new rdd binary straight from your terminal. Both leave Rancher Desktop 1.x alone, and both put you a couple of commands away 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. The whole thing was nine files, one good idea, and a note in the source that read, more or less, this is just a quick proof of concept.