Podman has some serious issues they are not really fixing, we ran into an issue where builds just hang for a few minutes before doing anything. So we had to switch back to using docker desktop locally for that.
podman-compose has gotten much better. I used it for a work project a few months ago, and it ran fine. That said, I know there are some random little things podman-compose doesn't support, so be careful.
It's slightly more verbose than docker-compose, but podman supports it natively and you can actually wrap your app containers into a single "pod" for easier management.
Does it still completely screw up file/group owners in user containers? Because they keep saying it gets fixed and then that 1 out of 10 times it's not.
I like Podman, but what's up with that grey text colour? It looks ugly and the contrast of 4.96:1 makes it hard to read (does not reach WCAG AAA level).
I really love Quadlet. I used to host my rootless containers on Hetzner, Ansible, SystemD and RockyLinux for years without any issues and extracted it to template repo [1].
One thing I don't like about Podman is that it pretends to be docker-compatible while having some minor differences that will come to bite you. And users of your docker-based project who try to run it on Podman will come to you and complain.
My #1 complaint by far is that it --- pretty much silently --- depends on systemd to work correctly.
Try having a docker-compose with a service that waits until a dependency is healthy --- in a host that has no systemd (such as Alpine Linux).
The service will never start because Podman relies on systemd (and only systemd) to do the periodic healthchecks which it needs to do in order to handle such dependencies.
And of course, this fact isn't adequately documented anywhere. And Red Hat says they'll never, ever drop this dependency.
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But I don't know if there are any tools compatible with the Docker ecosystem other than Podman. I'd love to find one.
How is Podman these days? I use OrbStack on macOS and it seems to be much faster, not sure how everything will shake out now that macOS 27 is adding (more) native and performant Linux containers, similar to WSL with micro-VMs.
After Docker Desktop randomly started consuming insane amounts of memory again we switched to Podman and it was literally as easy as installing it and pointing it at our docker-compose.yml.
Zero changes needed and now I don’t need to keep a daemon running.
Cool, been running my home server on podman + quadlets for about two years now and picked up a couple of things in the release notes
podman quadlet list
Added in v5.6.0, lists quadlets and their containers
podman system migrate --migrate-db
Flag added in v5.8.0. I remember seeing the bolt db deprecation warnings in the past but there was no tool to do the migration to sqlite, now there is (or just upgrade to podman 6.0.0 and it will do it automatically)
If any Podman engineers are here: does the new /libpod/local/artifacts/add endpoint let me ingest individual layers? I have an alternative pull client that's currently a little hamstrung on Podman compared to docker+containerd, due to having to convert the entire image to tarball to ingest rather than only new layers.
I don't understand how podman can be used for serious development work. Sure, if you want to be bound to one single platform (linux), and create a bunch of individual files, you can sort of get something a little bit like compose.
But the beauty of compose is the same as the beauty of the Dockerfile. Portability, reproducibility (mostly), and a single readable file with all the relevant parts. It means a developer can use the same compose file locally that's used for deployment.
How do people actually work with podman? Do you work with a team? How do you setup a local development stack the way you would with compose?
podman-compose is "mostly" compatible. I "plain" podman at work, but there we just have a bunch of shell scripts that spin up/down/build containers. For regular dev work, it's fine.
For personal stuff, I've been experimenting with podman's Kubernetes files: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-kube.1.html. Which, IMO, "feel" like docker-compose the most. You can run services via "podman kube play ..." and install them via quadlet install too.
As long as they refuse to support installing on Ubuntu (and other popular distros), without relying on the distro repos which are always out of date, they will continue to lose to Docker.
Any serious project in this space supports as many distros as possible.
It's OSS, so I'm not complaining per se, I have no right to. They owe me nothing.
But this one issue has kept me from seriously considering Podman for years. They don't care about my use case and I therefore don't care to use their project.
When getting the latest version looks like this[1], who is really going to consider this for serious production uses?
Entirely different perspective: If I have to add a separate repo, then this is a red flag.
> Any serious project in this space supports as many distros as possible.
Wrong way around. Any serious product is supported by lots of distros. Distros curate their selection and if nobody bothered packaging your stuff, then your stuff is not good enough.
podman's been great for me on macOS for testing stuff quick; which earlier used to need a whole limactl[3]/virt thing.
you can set it up with qemu-user-static for --platform linux/amd64; i don't remember which i exactly used, or if official docs have been updated for it but looked something like [1]
there is one sneaky bug in qemu that breaks uv [2] for cross-platform targets so i keep having to fall back to lima for that, but great otherwise.
I wanted to love Podman, but unfortunately, in my current employer's we have macOS machines.
I had issues like when Podman randomly stopped responding and I had to "kill" the podman machine more than once or some container randomly built differently or failed (due to architecture diff).
This was not the case with Orbstack, but they are license-only, closed source and macOS only oriented.
I wish I could find a consistently good container management system that is multiplatform, ideally open source as well.
Having said this, I think I will try Podman (6.0) again, in macOS :)
I doubled down on Podman when moving to Fedora a couple years ago- couple small hiccups but mostly my shallow knowledge on SELinux and bind mounts. Big fan, especially quadlets + stow on my homelab- thanks Podman people!
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 55.7 ms ] threadThe new network stuff is a welcome improvement.
I have a lot of compose files in my homelab/automation setup and those are what I’m most concerned about.
What I'm experimenting with right now is defining stuff with a Kubernetes yaml, which podman also supports: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-kube.1.html.
It's slightly more verbose than docker-compose, but podman supports it natively and you can actually wrap your app containers into a single "pod" for easier management.
For anyone with a working homelab there is no reason to switch
If you're worried about security, both need extra work
[1] https://github.com/Mati365/hetzner-podman-bunjs-deploy
Try having a docker-compose with a service that waits until a dependency is healthy --- in a host that has no systemd (such as Alpine Linux).
The service will never start because Podman relies on systemd (and only systemd) to do the periodic healthchecks which it needs to do in order to handle such dependencies.
And of course, this fact isn't adequately documented anywhere. And Red Hat says they'll never, ever drop this dependency.
---
But I don't know if there are any tools compatible with the Docker ecosystem other than Podman. I'd love to find one.
Zero changes needed and now I don’t need to keep a daemon running.
Great software.
no "container root" / "docker group" = "host root" shenanigans
podman doesn't spew garbage and punch holes in my firewall (iptables)
(edit: formatting)
If I build an image with podman will it run in cri-o, docker and other misc runtimes?
Been debating on using rootless podman for building images since docker build requires sudo and it gets annoying with agentic workflows.
But the beauty of compose is the same as the beauty of the Dockerfile. Portability, reproducibility (mostly), and a single readable file with all the relevant parts. It means a developer can use the same compose file locally that's used for deployment.
How do people actually work with podman? Do you work with a team? How do you setup a local development stack the way you would with compose?
Not a big deal if you are developing server software, as most servers nowadays are Linux.
For personal stuff, I've been experimenting with podman's Kubernetes files: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-kube.1.html. Which, IMO, "feel" like docker-compose the most. You can run services via "podman kube play ..." and install them via quadlet install too.
Any serious project in this space supports as many distros as possible.
It's OSS, so I'm not complaining per se, I have no right to. They owe me nothing.
But this one issue has kept me from seriously considering Podman for years. They don't care about my use case and I therefore don't care to use their project.
When getting the latest version looks like this[1], who is really going to consider this for serious production uses?
1: https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/discussions...
> Any serious project in this space supports as many distros as possible.
Wrong way around. Any serious product is supported by lots of distros. Distros curate their selection and if nobody bothered packaging your stuff, then your stuff is not good enough.
you can set it up with qemu-user-static for --platform linux/amd64; i don't remember which i exactly used, or if official docs have been updated for it but looked something like [1]
there is one sneaky bug in qemu that breaks uv [2] for cross-platform targets so i keep having to fall back to lima for that, but great otherwise.
[1]: https://www.itix.fr/blog/qemu-user-static-with-podman/ [2]: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/16024 , https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/work_items/3130 [3]: https://lima-vm.io/
I had issues like when Podman randomly stopped responding and I had to "kill" the podman machine more than once or some container randomly built differently or failed (due to architecture diff).
This was not the case with Orbstack, but they are license-only, closed source and macOS only oriented.
I wish I could find a consistently good container management system that is multiplatform, ideally open source as well.
Having said this, I think I will try Podman (6.0) again, in macOS :)