The Docker daemon (likely the HyperKit VM) on the Mac has a tendency to burn CPU cycles, even when there are no containers running. It's pretty common for it to sit at 10-20% of a core all day, and sometimes gets pegged at 100% until you quit.
There are countless closed issues in the GitHub issue tracker [1] for similar issues, but the symptoms don't seem to go away for me or many of my colleagues.
It's been a pretty awful experience on Mac for a long time, so any competition is surely welcome.
I had the same frustrations until the other day I saw a tip to enable 'Use the new Virtualization framework' under Preferences -> Experimental Features. Since then Docker's background CPU usage has dropped to 1% and I no longer bother stopping it when I'm not using it.
I'm happy your platform of choice has no bugs nor quirks. Could you let us know which one it is? We can probably help you find the bullshit you put up with that has become second nature.
There are countless closed issues in the GitHub issue tracker [1] for similar issues, but the symptoms don't seem to go away for me or many of my colleagues.
It's been a pretty awful experience on Mac for a long time, so any competition is surely welcome.
[1] https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3499