Interestingly, SUSE now owns Rancher [0], so k3s has been backed by a large company for some time now. I've never tried k3s, but I have always thought it's probably the most loved-by-its-users version of Kubernetes.
If you want to easily try it out, we baked it into Rancher Desktop [1]. RD let's you run Kubernetes (via k3s) and containers on your desktop. You pick the k8s version.
We use it as a free replacement for Docker Desktop and it works very well.
Unfortunately, we cannot use the Kubernetes part of it because it comes with "steve" (used for dashboards), which uses and blocks (!) the same ports as our application, and those ports are not configurable.
So, please please solve this request here: https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/issues/18...
I just made an account here to say thank you. Rancher desktop is amazing on my M2 mac, it's easy to use, solves a bunch of challenges from k8s to docker and has been surprisingly reliable for a young product.
I've honestly been scared to switch from Docker Desktop to Rancher Desktop on Windows. Like do I have to switch or do they play nice together? Do I need to install Docker in WSL to use it, or kubectl, or is it like Docker Desktop where it "just works."
You can have Docker Desktop and Rancher Desktop installed on the same Windows machine. Last I checked, you can't run them both at the same time due to docker socket locations (assuming you run Rancher Desktop using Moby).
Rancher Desktop will provide the CLI tools to work with it.
The idea is "it just works". It's a desktop app so it installs what you need.
[0] https://www.suse.com/news/suse-completes-rancher-acquisition...