This is the 1.17.0 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
Open WebUI extension
Rancher Desktop now includes the "Open WebUI" extension. If not already present, it will download and install Ollama on the host (to have access to the GPU) and it will also run Open WebUI and SearXNG in containers to make it easy to explore and experiment with different LLM models. Working with LLMs using Open WebUI has more information.
RPM package works again on openSUSE
openSUSE made a change to QEMU that was incompatible with the RPM release of Rancher Desktop; the AppImage bundles its own copy of QEMU and was unaffected. Rancher Desktop 1.17.0 is compatible again with the version of QEMU used by the latest releases of openSUSE.
QEMU and Apple M4
Apple's M4 CPU was not supported by QEMU in earlier releases of Rancher Desktop (VZ was unaffected). 1.17.0 ships with a version of QEMU that has been fixed to work with M4 CPUs.
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.
Bundled k3s versions list
Rancher Desktop cannot start unless it has a list of available k3s versions. This has led to problems if the version list could not be determined at first start or after a factory reset. 1.17.0 bundles a k3s version list, which is up-to-date as of the release data of Rancher Desktop. As a result, the app will always have a list of available versions; it will only be potentially missing new versions released after 1.17.0 itself.
Networking improvements
Networking improvements have been made across all platforms, with updates to both upstream libraries and Rancher Desktop itself:
- Enabled UDP Port Forwarding when a network tunnel is active (#6821).
- Added support for the host network driver (--net=host) in both Docker and containerd engines (#7378).
- Resolved Docker Compose network TCP (RST) issues (#7720).
- Restored iptables scanning for Kubernetes ports in CNI-DN-* that were previously overlooked (#7722).
- Addressed performance inefficiencies in the guestAgent process on Windows (#7763), (#7782), (#7825), (#7891), and (#7558).
Known Issues
MSI installer does not install missing WSL on Windows 11 (#7975)
The Rancher Desktop install does not correctly process the latest output from the wsl --version command on Windows 11 and fails to install WSL2 if it is not already present. The workaround is to manually install WSL2 before installing Rancher Desktop.
VZ emulation no longer works offline
Due to a change in a networking dependency, it is no longer possible to run VMs using VZ emulation while offline. QEMU is unaffected. Stay with 1.16.0 if you require VZ mode to work while disconnected.
spinkube operator has incompatible changes
The spinkube operator has been updated to version 0.4.0, which had incompatible API changes; it is likely that all applications using it need to be redeployed.
Deprecations
macOS 12 Monterey and earlier are no longer 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.
While Rancher Desktop 1.17.0 seems to work fine on macOS 12 Monterey, it should be considered unsupported.
The status of macOS 11 Big Sur is unknown, so auto-upgrade will not offer an upgrade to 1.17.0 on Big Sur or earlier.
Updates to Bundled Utilities
- amazon-eco-credential-helper unchanged
0.9.0 - docker
27.2.1→27.4.1 - docker-buildx
0.17.1→0.19.3 - docker-compose
2.29.5→2.32.1 - docker-credential-helpers unchanged
0.8.2 - helm
3.16.1→3.16.4 - kuberlr unchanged
0.5.2 - moby/buildkit
0.12.5→0.18.1 - nerdctl
1.7.7→2.0.2 - spin
2.7.0→3.1.1 - spin-shim
0.15.1→0.17.0 - spinkube
0.3.0→0.4.0 - trivy
0.55.2→0.58.1
Connect with the developers
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The issue queue
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Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel
Changelog
The full version changelog, from v1.16.0, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.17.0 milestone.