Before we start using Docker, you obviously need to install it. There are several installation channels to choose from. For many Linux distributions, there are packages available in their package manager. For Windows and macOS, you need to go to the Docker website and download the installer. This is actually the preferred one as the versions available from the package managers may not be up to date.

There are several graphical interfaces to manage Docker, but we'll keep it simple and just use the command-line interface. This gives you greater control and you get to know more of the internals of how everything is glued together.

So, let's open a console and type docker info to check whether everything is correct:

You can see that there are no containers or images running. There is other information, such as storage and network information. You may also figure out that Docker for Mac uses a virtual machine to enable Docker on a macOS laptop.

This means that the docker command is actually a proxy to the docker command inside that virtual machine. You don't have to worry about it, it will work just fine; you'll probably only notice some lag from time to time.