It's a major hassle and if you are going to get a small box to plug in all kinds of other small box around it with a web of cables, you might as well get a bigger box and put it all inside...

mini-ITX case start around 3L nowadays...

That's an interesting claim. An external drive is just another block device. Is this something you experienced?

Why? Thunderbolt is PCI-E. There shouldn't be any difference between TB attached storage and adding disks to a desktop tower.

This doesn’t seem to be true, and I don’t even get what it would change if it were true. Developers aren’t the target demographic of the base version with low storage.

Docker on Mac works fine on external drive. I moved the storage volume on a rotating USB 3 drive.

That's news to me, who's doing it right now on my imac m1.

Since macOS is a UNIX system, can’t you just use a symlink to the external drive or is there something specific about Docker that prevents this?

Docker in macOS (at least the useful one) just runs in a Linux VM, and I don't see why you couldn't run a VM off an image on an external drive. Maybe the UI doesn't let you select that location?

Which is a Linux and Windows technology anyway, so better buy something that offers first class support for them.

> Which is a Linux and Windows technology anyway

This is quite possibly the dumbest comment I have ever read on Hacker News. Congratulations!

Sure it can!