Basically yes. Rancher Desktop sets up K3s in a VM and gives you a kubectl, docker and a few other binaries preconfigured to talk to that VM. K3s is just a lightweight all-in-one Kubernetes distro that's relatively easy to set up (of course, you still have to learn Kubernetes so it's not really easy, just skips the cluster setup).
Basically yes. Rancher Desktop sets up K3s in a VM and gives you a
kubectl,dockerand a few other binaries preconfigured to talk to that VM. K3s is just a lightweight all-in-one Kubernetes distro that's relatively easy to set up (of course, you still have to learn Kubernetes so it's not really easy, just skips the cluster setup).Thanks for the info. For others curious, here's a decent short intro to K3s.
Now I'm kind of wondering if this is light enough for integration tests.
For integration tests I'd go with kind instead. Use it in my work and it works perfectly in our ci/CD. https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/