I had a similar experience trying to switch to docker-machine as it sounds like you've had with the new apps, and ended up giving up.
It's super simple through Vagrant though, just vagrant up and set DOCKER_HOST to the static IP. Plus there are vagrant plugins that let you sync a directory to the vm in a way that gives you inotify events so live build/update tools can run in your containers (which btw is huge, I can't believe the official apps haven't even attempted to address that, as far as I've seen).
The company claimed back in March [0] that Docker for Mac addresses the filesystem events. I observed that it works.
While Docker for Mac has improved somewhat over the beta, unfortunately it's still quite rough. For example, it was only last week that they pushed a fix for the DNS timeout issue [1] (I think maybe it was fixed? I can't check because Docker for Mac is not open source).
The DNS resolving code in Docker for Mac is in the VPNkit project which is open-source: https://github.com/docker/vpnkit. A DNS timeout is a fairly general symptom and it's hard to diagnose fully without a packet capture, but there's one issue that I'm aware of: if the primary server is down then the UDP DNS queries and responses will use the host's second server. However if a response is large and requires TCP then unfortunately we will still forward it to the primary server, which obviously won't work :( I've filed this issue about it: https://github.com/docker/vpnkit/issues/96. We hope to improve DNS, VPN and general proxy support for 1.13 -- please do file issues for any other bugs you find!
> Plus there are vagrant plugins that let you sync a directory to the vm in a way that gives you inotify events so live build/update tools can run in your containers (which btw is huge, I can't believe the official apps haven't even attempted to address that, as far as I've seen).
If you don't mind, what are these plugins? This is one thing that's sorely missed when I do development with Vagrant. I did a small amount of searching and trial and error, but couldn't find a solution that worked for me.
There used to be a separate vagrant plugin for rsync but it's now built-in. There is also built-in support for NFS and virtualbox/vmware synced folders. These all work reasonably well until you start having fairly large numbers of files/directories.
Also if you use a native Linux host with LXC or Docker there is no overhead for sharing directories with the container, it's just a bind mount.
I don't believe NFS supports inotify events? At least, that's what I'm using, and I'm forced to use polling for any file change detection. And rsync is one-way IIRC. But yes, LXC on Linux works great when it's feasible; I've just been looking for something that supports file change detection on other platforms.
It's super simple through Vagrant though, just vagrant up and set DOCKER_HOST to the static IP. Plus there are vagrant plugins that let you sync a directory to the vm in a way that gives you inotify events so live build/update tools can run in your containers (which btw is huge, I can't believe the official apps haven't even attempted to address that, as far as I've seen).