Alpha 1 of Rancher Desktop 2.0 shipped without a Preferences dialog. Everything worked, but you could only change settings from the command line. Alpha 2 brings the dialog back, and it reads and writes the same App object as the command line tools do.

Rancher Desktop 2.0's settings screen covers a handful of fields, and the API underneath it has no reference docs. But you don't really need them; you can ask rdd itself what you can change, and once you change something, you can watch it reshape the virtual machine, step by step, until the actual state matches what you asked for.

Enable Kubernetes in Rancher Desktop 2.0 and you get a cluster, which is no surprise. But the daemon that runs it, rdd, is itself a Kubernetes API server too. It holds Rancher Desktop's own state as objects you can query. So there are actually two Kubernetes API servers on your machine, and only one of them runs your pods.

You reported a bug against Rancher Desktop, someone fixed it, and the issue got closed. But the fix is sitting on main, and the next release is still weeks out. You'd rather know now, while reopening the issue is still easy. You can, because every merge to main, and every pull request, produces an installable Rancher Desktop build, whether you're on 1.x or 2.0. Running one is more involved than installing a release, and a bad build can damage files on your host.

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.