This is the 1.16.0 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Installers
Notable Changes and Bug Fixes
Windows networking updates
Removing support for the legacy networking stack on Windows uncovered a couple of remaining issues:
-
Removed the legacy network stack (#7296)
-
Removed iptables scraping from the guest agent (#7447)
-
Resolved IP address collisions with userspace networks in other WSL distributions (#7383)
-
Addressed open connection issues in wsl-proxy, preventing the distro from exhausting file descriptors (#7331)
docker buildx and docker compose plugins are using the updated binaries (Windows)
Rancher Desktop has been shipping updated docker-buildx and docker-compose executables, but when they are started as a plugin via docker buildx or docker compose then they are loaded from the %USERPROFILE%\.docker\cli-plugins directory and not located via the PATH. Previous Rancher Desktop releases would not overwrite existing files in the plugin directory, which means docker buildx and docker compose could have been running outdated version.
Automatic PATH management has been fixed (macOS, Linux)
The changes made in 1.15.0 to prevent shell profiles from being deleted in certain edge conditions broke the updating of shell profiles completely. This happened only with the signed release versions, which is why it wasn't detected earlier.
In 1.16.0 any kind of extended attributes on a shell profile will be copied and will not prevent the update (#7394).
sudo-prompt applet is a native binary for macOS on Apple Silicon
The 1.15.0 release was supposed to be fully native for Apple Silicon, but it turned out that the applet to prompt for the sudo password was still Intel-only. Now Rosetta should really no longer be needed for Rancher Desktop.
Known Issues
Rancher Desktop stopped working on openSUSE Tumbleweed
This is due to a breaking change in the firmware shipped with QEMU on openSUSE (#7463). The openSUSE bug is tracked by https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1230291.
This issue does not affect installation using the AppImage installer because it bundles its own version of QEMU.
Container Dashboard
The dashboard does not update automatically when container states have changed or new containers are introduced (#5775).
Extensions Install - Allowed Images
When using the Allowed Images feature and also specifying extensions in a deployment profile, the extension images must be included in both lists (#4920).
Deprecations
macOS 11 Big Sur and earlier are no longer officially supported
Apple usually only provides security updates for the last 3 major macOS releases. GitHub removes CI runners once the OS is no longer supported. Due to availability of hardware resources and software dependencies, we may be unable to create new Rancher Desktop releases compatible with older macOS versions in the future.
We will try not to break Rancher Desktop on older macOS versions as long as reasonably possible, but those versions should be considered unsupported.
Updates to Bundled Utilities
- docker
26.1.0→27.1.1 - docker-buildx
0.14.1→0.16.2 - docker-compose
2.27.1→2.29.1 - docker-credential-ecr-login unchanged
0.8.0 - helm
3.15.1→3.15.3 - moby/buildkit unchanged
0.12.5 - nerdctl unchanged
1.7.6 - spin: new
2.5.1 - spin-shim:
0.14.1→0.15.1 - spinkube: unchanged
0.2.0 - trivy
0.51.4→0.53.0
Connect with the developers
-
The issue queue
-
Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel
Changelog
The full version changelog, from v1.15.1, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.16.0 milestone.