- 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.
Great software.
- 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].
[1] https://github.com/Mati365/hetzner-podman-bunjs-deploy
- 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to support installing on Ubuntu (and other popular distros), without relying on the distro repos which are always out of date, they will continue to lose to Docker.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?
1: https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/discussions...
by PufPufPuf
4 subcomments
- 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.
- Anyone have experience switching from Docker to Podman?
I have a lot of compose files in my homelab/automation setup and those are what I’m most concerned about.
- 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)
by SwellJoe
34 subcomments
- No idea why Docker is still so much more popular than Podman. Podman is obviously the better implementation.
The new network stuff is a welcome improvement.
- Quadlets and rootless containers are two major reasons I'll be switching from Docker to Podman.
- 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).
by satvikpendem
2 subcomments
- 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.
- 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!
by mjburgess
4 subcomments
- Sanctuary! mercy from grey font
- 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.
- It is a bit buried, but Podman now follows the UAPI Configuration Files Specification as well as the Base Directory Specification. This is great!
by himata4113
0 subcomment
- Does anyone have experience with using podman image builds for cri runtimes other than docker?
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.
by victor_vhv
0 subcomment
- 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 :)
by buredoranna
1 subcomments
- Top of my list as to why I prefer podman...
no "container root" / "docker group" = "host root" shenanigans
podman doesn't spew garbage and punch holes in my firewall (iptables)
(edit: formatting)
by thewisenerd
0 subcomment
- 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.
[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/
- How my mindset changed :
- What's Docker?
- wow Docker is so convenient
- hmmm all that convenience is creating new problems
- is Docker really open?
- What's Podman?
- Ugh Podman is a great idea but does not work
- Is Podman working better now?
- ... kinda, just for testing on my machine
- wow... Podman works just as well as Docker in 99.99% of my cases
... so yes except for the last .01% (e.g. rather niche https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues/792 ) is now my default container engine.
by jdoe1337halo
1 subcomments
- I'd love to switch to Podman but I use Coolify for all of my deployments and it is Docker based, so I am kind of locked into that ecosystem for now
by alessandroberna
0 subcomment
- I love the naming of their new networking tools. Now there's pesto to go along with pasta
- 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.
- single-file quadlets go
by bioninf_n_door
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
- 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?
Hacker News