How do you manage local development dependencies? If you need to build containers on your laptop and you want minikube to pull them form your laptop rather than a remote container registry you will benefit from running Docker desktop since it includes a local container registry. By default it will try to resolve container images from Docker hub and other public registries.

Minikube does not ship with a container registry. If you are building your container image using tools such as JIB that don’t require a local Docker daemon you can run minikube without Docker desktop. If you use a Dockerfile during development you will need to have Docker desktop installed, otherwise you won’t be able to run docker build to create a container image on your laptop. For example, minikube start -kubernetes-version=v1.18.3 will launch k8s 1.18.3 You can pass minikube a command line argument to launch a specific version of k8s. Minikube supports the most recent GA version of k8s plus the previous 6 minor versions. Basically Docker is shipping the “most stable, widely used” version of k8s since many organizations run the oldest GA version of k8s in production. If you need an older version of k8s you will have to install an older version of Docker desktop. Currently it is not possible to change the version of k8s in Docker desktop.