Podman Desktop celebrates 3M downloads (opens in new tab)

I prefer to use podman/docker/rancher on windows because then the VM runs on HyperV.

Whereas when I install Docker in WSL it runs inside of my WSL VM.

> unlike docker in my experience

You have piqued my curiosity. What does Docker Desktop do that the CLI cannot?

For mac, wouldn't it be just easier to use lima from cli? How does Podman compare to that? Docker unless on Linux has always being a bloat.

Or are there any lightweight hypervisor on top of firecracker alternative? At this point with the way systemd is going, we should just switch back to VM? Everything is just more mature on native OS install. Docker to Linux, just feels kinda like SPA reinventing the html parsing on top of a rendering engine.

I'm the same. I just use Docker/Podman from the terminal. I know some people really like the GUI but I've never been able to find a workflow better than the cli with some scripts or compose.

Cool for Podman Desktop though.

My experience was exact opposite.

$ brew install podman-desktop

… play a little …

$ brew remove —zap docker-desktop

Have been happy ever since. No more smells of enshittification. Now if I could just zap slack and figma…

It almost is, the first change you'd see is understanding that each container is a separate process and thus for it to auto start you'd need to generate systemd service files. podman has an autogenerator for this, so it is 'just' two extra commands on the terminal but something easy to miss when you are starting out.

I wasted my time trying podman and switched to colima. It's the only usable free alternative that's a true drop-in replacement for docker.

I use podman desktop on Windows for common development stuff as drop in replacement. I switched due to licensing as I guess universities do not fall under the licencing exceptions. I actually also use the docker CLI, particularly docker compose. I was motivated to do the same on one of our Debian vms, because I could more install podmap via standard apt sources, i hoped that it doesn't mess to that much with the IP stack and it is a bit closer to K8s which I still deemed as overkill. However, trying to install e.g. komo.do via podman compose was a total fail. Even after fixing socket locations, etc, I would see weird behavior. So yes, it is a clear 'almost'. However, the critical cases can become easily very frustrating. Again, on my windows laptop with WSL2 it works like a charm, but there I also do not run server deployments that need to work reliably out of the box.

I almost never notice the difference. I know there are some edge cases that will get you, but I've never run into them.

I had a brief period of setup pain and then have never looked back, though have occasionally wished that feature parity came a little quicker. Podman is in many ways a delight, simpler in what it does in the general case and yet as powerful as docker or more.

Mostly valid. There are a few gotchas but for most use cases it is drop-in. I think I've run into issues with the podman socket, and there were some permissions problems I had getting games-on-whales setup in userspace.

Worked for me for a long time until I found the samba-ad image won't run on podman. Worked fine on the same machine with docker.

Everything else has been working as a drop-in replacement.

Podman has good systemd integration, in the form of quadlets.

It lets you define a systemd job with some custom syntax and run it as a systemd service, and even stretches to allow some form of kubernetes YAML to be run as local (single node, rootless) containers!

Real nice.

See previous presentation on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43456934

I use it over docker because it has a better license, more easily installed with system package managers (installing docker is a pain, IIRC), is rootless by default, and has a pretty transparent remote API that I can use over SSH to control containers on other machines.

Besides being a great replacement for docker for development, I use it to run some government GUI apps that I don't want to install on my machine (they have some bg jobs that I prefer not running 24/7). Once I finish running them I just shut down the container and don't have to worry about it.

Are you using Docker on it's own merit or because it's familiar and first?

You're pointing out something important. I think it's feasible for the crowd who dislikes the overall direction Docker has been heading and need a simple drop-in replacement

The licence is better. That's enough for me.

It works but it's not a real drop-in replacement in my experience. I have issues such as [1] where Podman compose seems to leave containers in a dirty state and subsequent `podman compose up` generate odd errors like:

> Error: creating container storage: the container name "..." is already in use by [hash]. You have to remove that container to be able to reuse that name: that name is already in use, or use --replace to instruct Podman to do so.

And then you try to run `podman compose up --replace` except that's not a recognized argument, so eventually you figure out that you have to run `podman compose down` to clean whatever state is causing issues. I find that I have to do that every time I CTRL+C quit out of `podman compose up` (even though I always let it clean up and then exit on its own), which is a hassle.

I'm considering going back to using Docker Engine.

[1] https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues/1072

yes "Podman v3.0 and later versions introduced a compatible RESTful API that emulates the Docker API. This allows the standard docker-compose command-line tool to interact with a Podman backend instead of a Docker daemon."

It's free? Can run rootless?

I run rootless containers on a low-power system.

With Docker, I found rootless setup to be a PITA, despite having experience with unprivileged LXC containers. The manager daemon constantly consumed system resources even when no containers were running. Docker upgrades sometimes refused to run my containers until I chased down whatever storage driver problem they introduced in the latest version.

When the most recent upgrade broke my containers yet again, I decided to give Podman a try. Setup was a breeze. There is no management daemon wasting resources. My containers just worked. Even the little cron script I wrote to query Docker for pending image updates just worked with Podman tools.

I think Podman also makes it easy to map host uids to non-root container uids, which ought to help me reduce attack surface. (I haven't actually tried this feature yet.) Last time I checked, Docker did not.

So far, I couldn't be happier.

docker desktop licensing changes in 2021

On Snapdragon / ARM Windows, it is the only game in town -- and it works great too!

It's got a more modern design while having a drop-in CLI interface to docker (and also if needed a near-drop-in replacement for the docker socket API). This makes it the preferred backend for tools like distrobox.

Docker took too long to support cgroups v2

It comes preinstalled on RHEL8 and I can't be bothered to swap them.

It supports Kubernetes *.yaml manifests?