7 ms·

Podman Desktop celebrates 3M downloads

238 points by twelvenmonkeys 1y ago

ashirviskas 1y ago
Why podman and not Docker?
- jrks11o 1y ago
  docker desktop licensing changes in 2021
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  It's free? Can run rootless?
  - Vilian 1y ago
    Better integration with systemd
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - TacticalCoder 1y ago
      That's funny. To me one of the whole point of containers is that it's not systemd that's PID1. Combine that with a distro like Talos, an immutable Linux distro that contains less than ten executables and where none of them is systemd and... At long last containers and stuff like Talos show a path leading to, in a not-so-distant future, a world where we can be systemd and [ini]/microsoft config files (from a microsoft employee btw) free again.
      - AceJohnny2 1y ago
        It's not about running systemd in the container (practically nothing does that, though I myself considered it for a multi-user ssh shell system), but making containers manageable under systemd alongside other units.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  Docker took too long to support cgroups v2
- seemaze 1y ago
  It supports Kubernetes *.yaml manifests?
  - hdjrudni 1y ago
    Is that a question or a statement? I'm running Kubernetes on Docker Desktop. But every few months Docker Desktop either outright craps out and forces me to wipe everything and rebuild my containers or the latest annoyance is that it keeps giving me popups saying something something couldn't start Ubuntu.... but then seems to work perfectly fine after skipping it 10 times.
    - nozzlegear 1y ago
      Podman directly supports kubernetes manifest files without running a kubernetes instance. You can do: podman kube play --replace k8s.yaml podman kube down k8s.yaml podman kube apply --namespace project -f k8s.yaml I'm not familiar with Docker Desktop so maybe that just works there too.
- cowmix 1y ago
  On Snapdragon / ARM Windows, it is the only game in town -- and it works great too!
- scuff3d 1y ago
  It comes preinstalled on RHEL8 and I can't be bothered to swap them.
- foresto 1y ago
  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.
  - bootsmann 1y ago
    > Even the little cron script I wrote to query Docker for pending image updates just worked with Podman tools Podman comes with an auto-update flag you can set for containers that uses systemd to do this for you. Takes a bit of reading to get it right but its smooth sailing mostly.
    - foresto 1y ago
      Good to know, but my script is for a different workflow: It checks for updates to remote dependencies of my running custom containers. (For example, when alpine:latest points to something new.) It then prints a message for cron to email to me, noting that it's time to rebuild my custom stuff.
- aragilar 1y ago
  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.
htrp 1y ago
I've seen podman advertised as a dropin docker replacement. how valid is that assertion?
- jamesboehmer 1y ago
  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.
  - stock_toaster 1y ago
    colima is great. I've also had good luck with rancher-desktop too.
    - ahoka 1y ago
      RD is colima + some other stuff. I prefer vanilla colima (also works on Linux!)
- GauntletWizard 1y ago
  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.
- dodos 1y ago
  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.
- scuff3d 1y ago
  I almost never notice the difference. I know there are some edge cases that will get you, but I've never run into them.
- demonshreder 1y ago
osigurdson 1y ago
I'm glad they have podman desktop. Personally though, once I realized that I can use the command line version without it (unlike docker in my experience) I uninstalled it as I don't really need the UI / KIND, etc. For me the command line is fine and having something where I don't have to first shell into wsl is great (it just runs it itself behind the scenes). Of course, Linux is generally better for development imo but this is a nice compromise on Windows.
- arcanemachiner 1y ago
  > unlike docker in my experience You have piqued my curiosity. What does Docker Desktop do that the CLI cannot?
  - danielnesbitt 1y ago
    Since they mention Windows, I believe this is a reference to the fact that you cannot (easily) install the Docker CLI without Docker Desktop. Podman does not have this issue.
    - no_carrier 1y ago
      You absolutely can run docker on the CLI in WSL2. The only requirement is you have systemd running in your WSL distro, which is fully supported.
      - osigurdson 1y ago
        Yes, of course that works, but then you have to start up and shell into WSL. With podman, you can run all commands directly in Windows which is more seamless. Plus, getting it working is just a matter of running "winget install -e --id RedHat.Podman". This is particularly helpful when trying to roll things out for larger teams as they don't have to know anything about WSL and everything integrates in their environment seamlessly. Of course, just using Linux is preferable for development if you can get away with it.
      - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
dkga 1y ago
Congratulations to the podman team!
Raed667 1y ago
my interaction with docker is limited to a make file that has a `docker-compose up` command, would podman work if the rest of my team is still on docker ?
- Maxious 1y ago
  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."
- dns_snek 1y ago
  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 https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues/1072
miroljub 1y ago
Does anyone actually use Podman on its own merit? The only use case I encountered is people who want to run Docker without root or admin permissions and use Podman just as a drop-in replacement.
- ludamn 1y ago
  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.
- whirlwin 1y ago
  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
- regularfry 1y ago
  The licence is better. That's enough for me.
- FrenchyJiby 1y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43456934
  - sofixa 1y ago
    All I can think of with this is... _But why?_ I mean, if you have one container service only and everything else is ran by systemd, then it makes sense to keep it easy. But other than that, why? Systemd's syntax and docs aren't particularly friendly or easy, so it's not like you gain in simplicity vs just running docker/podman-compose, or even a lightweight orchestrator like Nomad.
pjmlp 1y ago
The fact that many companies nowadays forbid to use Docker Desktop, because they refuse to pay for developer tools also helped with those downloads. Likewise, I am contributing to Rancher Desktop downloads with such kind of customers.
user3939382 1y ago
After hearing about it for years I finally said ok sure I’ll try it. Swapped it out. CPU went to 100%. kill -9. Maybe next year. I don’t have time unfortunately to unravel stuff like this, it has to just work.
- travisgriggs 1y ago
  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…
  - user3939382 1y ago
    I used matterbridge to bridge local ircd to Slack and a bot to do a 2 way sync. Now people are free to use slack but I don’t have to look at it, and I can freely integrate my tools etc without Slack’s bullshit and easily move/integrate/point it somewhere else down the line. Figma is so slow on my 3-4 year old x64 mbp I couldn’t possibly use it.
RickJWagner 1y ago
Congrats to the small but mighty team behind Podman Desktop. This is an example of Red Hat planting a tiny seed that grows into something great. ( They have a pretty good ratio of seeds that grows into vs seeds that don’t. They also make minimal investment until the project is viable. This does not seem to be a common approach. )
krunger 1y ago
Congratulations IBM!
sergsoares 1y ago
Using podman for years for local containers development and the last months for hosting my personal services is good to see that. Congrats to podman team.

ashirviskas 1y ago

Why podman and not Docker?

jrks11o 1y ago
docker desktop licensing changes in 2021
paulryanrogers 1y ago
It's free? Can run rootless?
- Vilian 1y ago
  Better integration with systemd
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - TacticalCoder 1y ago
    That's funny. To me one of the whole point of containers is that it's not systemd that's PID1. Combine that with a distro like Talos, an immutable Linux distro that contains less than ten executables and where none of them is systemd and... At long last containers and stuff like Talos show a path leading to, in a not-so-distant future, a world where we can be systemd and [ini]/microsoft config files (from a microsoft employee btw) free again.
    - AceJohnny2 1y ago
      It's not about running systemd in the container (practically nothing does that, though I myself considered it for a multi-user ssh shell system), but making containers manageable under systemd alongside other units.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
Docker took too long to support cgroups v2
seemaze 1y ago
It supports Kubernetes *.yaml manifests?
- hdjrudni 1y ago
  Is that a question or a statement? I'm running Kubernetes on Docker Desktop. But every few months Docker Desktop either outright craps out and forces me to wipe everything and rebuild my containers or the latest annoyance is that it keeps giving me popups saying something something couldn't start Ubuntu.... but then seems to work perfectly fine after skipping it 10 times.
  - nozzlegear 1y ago
    Podman directly supports kubernetes manifest files without running a kubernetes instance. You can do: podman kube play --replace k8s.yaml podman kube down k8s.yaml podman kube apply --namespace project -f k8s.yaml I'm not familiar with Docker Desktop so maybe that just works there too.
cowmix 1y ago
On Snapdragon / ARM Windows, it is the only game in town -- and it works great too!
scuff3d 1y ago
It comes preinstalled on RHEL8 and I can't be bothered to swap them.
foresto 1y ago
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.
- bootsmann 1y ago
  > Even the little cron script I wrote to query Docker for pending image updates just worked with Podman tools Podman comes with an auto-update flag you can set for containers that uses systemd to do this for you. Takes a bit of reading to get it right but its smooth sailing mostly.
  - foresto 1y ago
    Good to know, but my script is for a different workflow: It checks for updates to remote dependencies of my running custom containers. (For example, when alpine:latest points to something new.) It then prints a message for cron to email to me, noting that it's time to rebuild my custom stuff.
aragilar 1y ago
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.

htrp 1y ago

I've seen podman advertised as a dropin docker replacement. how valid is that assertion?

jamesboehmer 1y ago
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.
- stock_toaster 1y ago
  colima is great. I've also had good luck with rancher-desktop too.
  - ahoka 1y ago
    RD is colima + some other stuff. I prefer vanilla colima (also works on Linux!)
GauntletWizard 1y ago
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.
dodos 1y ago
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.
scuff3d 1y ago
I almost never notice the difference. I know there are some edge cases that will get you, but I've never run into them.
demonshreder 1y ago

osigurdson 1y ago

I'm glad they have podman desktop. Personally though, once I realized that I can use the command line version without it (unlike docker in my experience) I uninstalled it as I don't really need the UI / KIND, etc. For me the command line is fine and having something where I don't have to first shell into wsl is great (it just runs it itself behind the scenes). Of course, Linux is generally better for development imo but this is a nice compromise on Windows.

arcanemachiner 1y ago
> unlike docker in my experience You have piqued my curiosity. What does Docker Desktop do that the CLI cannot?
- danielnesbitt 1y ago
  Since they mention Windows, I believe this is a reference to the fact that you cannot (easily) install the Docker CLI without Docker Desktop. Podman does not have this issue.
  - no_carrier 1y ago
    You absolutely can run docker on the CLI in WSL2. The only requirement is you have systemd running in your WSL distro, which is fully supported.
    - osigurdson 1y ago
      Yes, of course that works, but then you have to start up and shell into WSL. With podman, you can run all commands directly in Windows which is more seamless. Plus, getting it working is just a matter of running "winget install -e --id RedHat.Podman". This is particularly helpful when trying to roll things out for larger teams as they don't have to know anything about WSL and everything integrates in their environment seamlessly. Of course, just using Linux is preferable for development if you can get away with it.
    - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

dkga 1y ago

Congratulations to the podman team!

Raed667 1y ago

my interaction with docker is limited to a make file that has a `docker-compose up` command, would podman work if the rest of my team is still on docker ?

Maxious 1y ago
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."
dns_snek 1y ago
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 https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues/1072

miroljub 1y ago

Does anyone actually use Podman on its own merit? The only use case I encountered is people who want to run Docker without root or admin permissions and use Podman just as a drop-in replacement.

ludamn 1y ago
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.
whirlwin 1y ago
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
regularfry 1y ago
The licence is better. That's enough for me.
FrenchyJiby 1y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43456934
- sofixa 1y ago
  All I can think of with this is... _But why?_ I mean, if you have one container service only and everything else is ran by systemd, then it makes sense to keep it easy. But other than that, why? Systemd's syntax and docs aren't particularly friendly or easy, so it's not like you gain in simplicity vs just running docker/podman-compose, or even a lightweight orchestrator like Nomad.

pjmlp 1y ago

The fact that many companies nowadays forbid to use Docker Desktop, because they refuse to pay for developer tools also helped with those downloads. Likewise, I am contributing to Rancher Desktop downloads with such kind of customers.

user3939382 1y ago

After hearing about it for years I finally said ok sure I’ll try it. Swapped it out. CPU went to 100%. kill -9. Maybe next year. I don’t have time unfortunately to unravel stuff like this, it has to just work.

travisgriggs 1y ago
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…
- user3939382 1y ago
  I used matterbridge to bridge local ircd to Slack and a bot to do a 2 way sync. Now people are free to use slack but I don’t have to look at it, and I can freely integrate my tools etc without Slack’s bullshit and easily move/integrate/point it somewhere else down the line. Figma is so slow on my 3-4 year old x64 mbp I couldn’t possibly use it.

RickJWagner 1y ago

Congrats to the small but mighty team behind Podman Desktop. This is an example of Red Hat planting a tiny seed that grows into something great. ( They have a pretty good ratio of seeds that grows into vs seeds that don’t. They also make minimal investment until the project is viable. This does not seem to be a common approach. )

krunger 1y ago

Congratulations IBM!

sergsoares 1y ago

Using podman for years for local containers development and the last months for hosting my personal services is good to see that. Congrats to podman team.