8 ms·

Podman v6.0.0

648 points by soheilpro 3mo ago

lorbus 3mo ago
single-file quadlets go
mjburgess 3mo ago
Sanctuary! mercy from grey font
- zdragnar 3mo ago
  You've come to the wrong website to complain about contrast issues, my friend.
  - sph 3mo ago
    ? HN’s contrast is great. It’s black on a light yellow-beige.
    - zdragnar 3mo ago
      SO much of the text of a comment thread is not black, though. The line above each comment is gray. Downvoted comments are various shades of gray. The "help" link next to the comment box is gray. I've seen worse, but gray on beige is not my favorite.
    - Xunjin 3mo ago
      Please tell me you are being sarcastic.
- cheema33 3mo ago
  Agreed. My first thought after that page loaded was, "why is this page harder to read?"
- whalesalad 3mo ago
  also serif. almost like half the stylesheet is missing.
- dmitris 3mo ago
  Shift-Cmd-R Reader Mode if on Mac
  - skybrian 3mo ago
    I think you mean in Safari?
alessandroberna 3mo ago
I love the naming of their new networking tools. Now there's pesto to go along with pasta
SwellJoe 3mo ago
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.
- q8zd3 3mo ago
  it has a stronger brand, probably because it was created first. I still hear the term "docker container" (sometimes).
  - ffsm8 3mo ago
    > sometimes I've never interacted with anyone that knew them by another name. It's always (docker) container, where they may leave out the docker term, but if questioed what kind of container they mean theyll say it. And the times I've called them OCI container (or image when talking about those) nobody knew what I meant until I clarified to docker
    - dockerimage 3mo ago
      I hear occasionally Image Container, but even that is fundamentally docker flavored because when disambiguating for the term "image". This comes up because we use both the Image and Package registries on Gitlab, so we sometimes have to absolutely specify, and the conversation lends to "The Docker Image one".
- alanwreath 3mo ago
  I mean for local dev I like that I can just press one button and have Kubernetes available. Podman Desktop had something approaching that simplicity but I have found Docker Desktop more stable in my limited experience with it.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- fithisux 3mo ago
  I used rancher + podman on Windows. Mainly Rancher. The last 8 months I use exclusively Podman + Podman Desktop. Rancher has a slightly better desktop app and can manage podman.
roger_ 3mo ago
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.
- goalieca 3mo ago
  Not a power user but compatibility has been excellent.
- therealmarv 3mo ago
  Would be great to know if I can uninstall docker on Mac and just install https://github.com/containers/podman/releases https://github.com/containers/podman/releases and be good to go with my docker compose files ?! I have the feeling the docker company is communicating a lot with Apple because virtualisation got better and better over the years. I wonder if podman would be a speed downgrade here?
  - chuckadams 3mo ago
    > I wonder if podman would be a speed downgrade here? Doubtful. But for sure it would be a compatibility downgrade. When I tried podman-compose a couple years ago, I found it nowhere near usable, though I'm told it's improved since. If you want a better Docker for mac, you're looking for OrbStack.
- kordlessagain 3mo ago
  I've been coding solutions against each. I'm currently having issues extracting progress from the current Podman on my TUI build pane, but now switching versions to see if it addresses it and continue working the issue. I have zero issues with it doing the builds I need. Works same same as Docker from what I can tell. I took Docker completely off my Macbook which has a tiny drive in it. Hardly ever use it, except for testing. Podman is super lightweight and using a project I'm developing, launches containers with dev agents in it, just the same as Windows running Docker.
- ekuck 3mo ago
  I switched everything over to rootless podman a year or two back. Some containers ended up with permissions issues when trying to read their old data - caused by being run with a different UID. This was really the only problem I ran into, but I would have had the same issue switching from rootful docker to rootless docker. Absolutely zero regrets, would never go back.
jimmar 3mo ago
Quadlets and rootless containers are two major reasons I'll be switching from Docker to Podman.
- kachnuv_ocasek 3mo ago
  Rootless was the reason I switched to Podman years ago. It's just so smooth and I don't have to worry about obscure permissions and services errors anymore.
- bjoli 3mo ago
  I administrate my home lab using podman desktop and quadlets. It is one of the few GUIs for what is mostly a cli utility that really adds value.
bioninf_n_door 3mo ago
[flagged]
jdoe1337halo 3mo ago
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
- tsoukase 3mo ago
  There is the podman-docker package that seamlessly emulates docker using podman. Eg for Arch Linux https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/podman-docker/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/podman-docker/
audidude 3mo ago
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.
Tepix 3mo ago
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).
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
mati365 3mo ago
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 https://github.com/Mati365/hetzner-podman-bunjs-deploy
- throw2ih020 3mo ago
  I switched my home server from k3s to quadlet and saw an 8% drop in power usage.
  - apexalpha 3mo ago
    Well hang on a second I have two nodes running k3s. 8%?? Did you accidentally also swap out the CPU governor?
    - lapcchan 3mo ago
      [dead]
    - robertlagrant 3mo ago
      I think it's an 8% drop on the previous usage, not 8% of total compute drop.
    - fuzzy2 3mo ago
      Why not? On my home server, k3s (single-node master), sitting idle (no workload, no changes), has amassed as much CPU time as a full virtual machine running Home Assistant: 17.75 hours in 106 hours of uptime. All those abstractions and cluster features do not come for free.
- mikebelanger 3mo ago
  If I may ask, what do you use to host now?
PufPufPuf 3mo ago
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.
- 2bitencryption 3mo ago
  I've found most of the differences to come not from the socket API, or the logical behavior, or CLI differences. But instead from assumptions Docker makes, that it's running rootful, when Podman will not (by default). As such, most of the fixes for Podman/Docker incompatibilities is just addressing that assumption with a few extra flags on the Podman commands to change how the user namespace maps between the container and the host, etc etc.
  - figmert 3mo ago
    This has been my experience too. And that conclusion, I've found that if I really don't want to deal with such quirks, I can indeed literally just run the same docker compose file in rootful mode, and it works. Making the changes required to run under rootless is often very simple.
  - PufPufPuf 3mo ago
    There are also different CLI flags (I recall something related to building and pushing multi-arch containers) and different features supported in compose.yml. Even rootful Podman won't be fully Docker-compatible.
- rgovostes 3mo ago
  I've been using Podman on Mac and Linux for 3 years, and unfortunately, I have found this to be perennially true. I am willing to doggedly pursue the root cause and file bugs, but for many people it will just seem broken. Most recently: Netavark doesn't match Docker's behavior with accepting broadcast traffic on a published port.
- tikkabhuna 3mo ago
  Yes! It put me off Podman for years. I do now think it has some clever ideas and if you’re running RHEL it’s a no brainer, but they should be more upfront that you will have to adapt. Especially if you’re moving from rootful docker to rootless Podman.
satvikpendem 3mo ago
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.
- threecheese 3mo ago
  Same question, same scenario. I tried it on MacOS, and the first issue I experienced (don’t recall what it was) had me deep into Redhat forums to even understand what was happening. Switching to OrbStack was a no-brainer, but there are obvious tradeoffs from a features perspective.
- chrysoprace 3mo ago
  I'm not sure about macOS, but it is seamless on Linux for my use cases. One thing to note is that Podman Compose defaults to docker-compose as the provider, and I haven't used the podman-compose provider (confusingly named slightly different to Podman Compose, which is the top level abstraction on top of docker-compose or podman-compose). You can still run containers through the Docker engine with Podman, if you need to.
cdmckay 3mo ago
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.
- chrisweekly 3mo ago
  I liked Orbstack better than colima which was better than Docker Desktop. Then I found https://smolmachines.com's https://smolmachines.com's smolvm microvms.
  - zuzululu 3mo ago
    been using orbstack but this smol stuff is interesting is this firecracker or total rewrite
    - binsquare 3mo ago
      author of smol machines here, it has no relation to firecracker. It runs ontop of the libkrun vmm forked with optimizations, which is the underlying lib powering podman as well. open source, will contribute upstream when possible: https://github.com/smol-machines/libkrun https://github.com/smol-machines/libkrun
      - glenjamin 3mo ago
        Upthread the implication seems to be that smolmachines would be in some way a replacement for orbstack to run docker containers But it seems more like a completely different way to run isolated workloads?
        binsquare 3mo ago
        smol machines is a virtual machine, akin to firecracker but designed to run locally as well It also has container-inages support built-in with crun so you can create a VM with a container running by default. You can also just... run docker inside of it.
buredoranna 3mo ago
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)
- drnick1 3mo ago
  > podman doesn't spew garbage and punch holes in my firewall (iptables) The way Docker silently rewrites iptables rules is just insane. It boggles my mind that someone thought that it would be a good idea, and that it survived a peer review.
  - buredoranna 3mo ago
    It was a major contributor to why I didn't learn more about containers earlier on.
himata4113 3mo ago
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.
muti 3mo ago
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)
a_t48 3mo ago
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.
LinXitoW 3mo ago
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?
- yoyohello13 3mo ago
  We have a consistent wsl image for everyone. So they are all on Linux. Then we have a podman pod defined in a bash script. We have a Justfile where you can run ‘just services’ and it all “just works (tm)”. Once the pod is defined you can use ‘podman pod up/down’ to interact with it, but mostly we encourage people to use the Just recipes to do the things. The thing is, podman has docker-compose like management built in, in the form of pods, but it doesn’t seem to be very well socialized. On the server we use quartet+systemd and it’s great. Never had an issue with that part.
- mattdw 3mo ago
  Podman can run compose - either its own, or docker-compose if you tell Podman to listen on the docker socket. I use Podman on both macos and Windows, with compose files, so I'm a bit perplexed by this whole comment.
- notnullorvoid 3mo ago
  I run podman for local dev containers or for isolated sandboxes mostly. Anything needing orchestration and I go straight to k8s, never liked docker compose.
- pezezin 3mo ago
  > Sure, if you want to be bound to one single platform (linux) Not a big deal if you are developing server software, as most servers nowadays are Linux.
- 3mo ago
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
rsyring 3mo ago
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/25582 https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/discussions...
- stryan 3mo ago
  To be clear, it doesn't explicitly not support Ubuntu or anything, it just doesn't privilege it. Podman doesn't produce packages for any distros.
  - rsyring 3mo ago
    Agreed. But, IMO, it looks like amateur hour when you compare their stance to the distro support Docker provides.
    - smarx007 3mo ago
      A slightly different perspective: Podman is made by the distro people (RedHat/Fedora). And they consider it unacceptable to mess with the software distribution channels of a distro. If Debian does not want latest Podman, they are not going to push the latest version to Debian users behind Debian repo's "back". This is a distro-to-distro respect rather than amateur hour.
      - michaelmrose 3mo ago
        I do not think this perspective is correct. You are considering official distro repos as a means to control what is allowed to be run on Debian. This is a kind of control commercial platforms often value because they use it to extract rent or to micromanage their experience that they sell to the rubes. Debian DOES care about about both experience and ethics of what is allowed to be distributed in official repos but it is contrary to the ethos of free software to care what you run on your machine or by extension what others choose to offer. You are intuiting a corporate sort of perspective where neither it nor the raison d'être for it exists.
thewisenerd 3mo ago
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/ https://www.itix.fr/blog/qemu-user-static-with-podman/ [2]: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/16024 https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/16024 , https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/work_items/3130 https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/work_items/3130 [3]: https://lima-vm.io/ https://lima-vm.io/
victor_vhv 3mo ago
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 :)
EddieB 3mo ago
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!
utopiah 3mo ago
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 https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues/792 ) is now my default container engine.
Hendrikto 3mo ago
It is a bit buried, but Podman now follows the UAPI Configuration Files Specification as well as the Base Directory Specification. This is great!

Podman v6.0.0

648 points by soheilpro 3mo ago

lorbus 3mo ago

single-file quadlets go

mjburgess 3mo ago

Sanctuary! mercy from grey font

zdragnar 3mo ago
You've come to the wrong website to complain about contrast issues, my friend.
- sph 3mo ago
  ? HN’s contrast is great. It’s black on a light yellow-beige.
  - zdragnar 3mo ago
    SO much of the text of a comment thread is not black, though. The line above each comment is gray. Downvoted comments are various shades of gray. The "help" link next to the comment box is gray. I've seen worse, but gray on beige is not my favorite.
  - Xunjin 3mo ago
    Please tell me you are being sarcastic.
cheema33 3mo ago
Agreed. My first thought after that page loaded was, "why is this page harder to read?"
whalesalad 3mo ago
also serif. almost like half the stylesheet is missing.
dmitris 3mo ago
Shift-Cmd-R Reader Mode if on Mac
- skybrian 3mo ago
  I think you mean in Safari?

alessandroberna 3mo ago

I love the naming of their new networking tools. Now there's pesto to go along with pasta

SwellJoe 3mo ago

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.

q8zd3 3mo ago
it has a stronger brand, probably because it was created first. I still hear the term "docker container" (sometimes).
- ffsm8 3mo ago
  > sometimes I've never interacted with anyone that knew them by another name. It's always (docker) container, where they may leave out the docker term, but if questioed what kind of container they mean theyll say it. And the times I've called them OCI container (or image when talking about those) nobody knew what I meant until I clarified to docker
  - dockerimage 3mo ago
    I hear occasionally Image Container, but even that is fundamentally docker flavored because when disambiguating for the term "image". This comes up because we use both the Image and Package registries on Gitlab, so we sometimes have to absolutely specify, and the conversation lends to "The Docker Image one".
alanwreath 3mo ago
I mean for local dev I like that I can just press one button and have Kubernetes available. Podman Desktop had something approaching that simplicity but I have found Docker Desktop more stable in my limited experience with it.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
fithisux 3mo ago
I used rancher + podman on Windows. Mainly Rancher. The last 8 months I use exclusively Podman + Podman Desktop. Rancher has a slightly better desktop app and can manage podman.

roger_ 3mo ago

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.

goalieca 3mo ago
Not a power user but compatibility has been excellent.
therealmarv 3mo ago
Would be great to know if I can uninstall docker on Mac and just install https://github.com/containers/podman/releases https://github.com/containers/podman/releases and be good to go with my docker compose files ?! I have the feeling the docker company is communicating a lot with Apple because virtualisation got better and better over the years. I wonder if podman would be a speed downgrade here?
- chuckadams 3mo ago
  > I wonder if podman would be a speed downgrade here? Doubtful. But for sure it would be a compatibility downgrade. When I tried podman-compose a couple years ago, I found it nowhere near usable, though I'm told it's improved since. If you want a better Docker for mac, you're looking for OrbStack.
kordlessagain 3mo ago
I've been coding solutions against each. I'm currently having issues extracting progress from the current Podman on my TUI build pane, but now switching versions to see if it addresses it and continue working the issue. I have zero issues with it doing the builds I need. Works same same as Docker from what I can tell. I took Docker completely off my Macbook which has a tiny drive in it. Hardly ever use it, except for testing. Podman is super lightweight and using a project I'm developing, launches containers with dev agents in it, just the same as Windows running Docker.
ekuck 3mo ago
I switched everything over to rootless podman a year or two back. Some containers ended up with permissions issues when trying to read their old data - caused by being run with a different UID. This was really the only problem I ran into, but I would have had the same issue switching from rootful docker to rootless docker. Absolutely zero regrets, would never go back.

jimmar 3mo ago

Quadlets and rootless containers are two major reasons I'll be switching from Docker to Podman.

kachnuv_ocasek 3mo ago
Rootless was the reason I switched to Podman years ago. It's just so smooth and I don't have to worry about obscure permissions and services errors anymore.
bjoli 3mo ago
I administrate my home lab using podman desktop and quadlets. It is one of the few GUIs for what is mostly a cli utility that really adds value.

bioninf_n_door 3mo ago

[flagged]

jdoe1337halo 3mo ago

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

tsoukase 3mo ago
There is the podman-docker package that seamlessly emulates docker using podman. Eg for Arch Linux https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/podman-docker/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/podman-docker/

audidude 3mo ago

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.

Tepix 3mo ago

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).

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

mati365 3mo ago

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 https://github.com/Mati365/hetzner-podman-bunjs-deploy

throw2ih020 3mo ago
I switched my home server from k3s to quadlet and saw an 8% drop in power usage.
- apexalpha 3mo ago
  Well hang on a second I have two nodes running k3s. 8%?? Did you accidentally also swap out the CPU governor?
  - lapcchan 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - robertlagrant 3mo ago
    I think it's an 8% drop on the previous usage, not 8% of total compute drop.
  - fuzzy2 3mo ago
    Why not? On my home server, k3s (single-node master), sitting idle (no workload, no changes), has amassed as much CPU time as a full virtual machine running Home Assistant: 17.75 hours in 106 hours of uptime. All those abstractions and cluster features do not come for free.
mikebelanger 3mo ago
If I may ask, what do you use to host now?

PufPufPuf 3mo ago

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.

2bitencryption 3mo ago
I've found most of the differences to come not from the socket API, or the logical behavior, or CLI differences. But instead from assumptions Docker makes, that it's running rootful, when Podman will not (by default). As such, most of the fixes for Podman/Docker incompatibilities is just addressing that assumption with a few extra flags on the Podman commands to change how the user namespace maps between the container and the host, etc etc.
- figmert 3mo ago
  This has been my experience too. And that conclusion, I've found that if I really don't want to deal with such quirks, I can indeed literally just run the same docker compose file in rootful mode, and it works. Making the changes required to run under rootless is often very simple.
- PufPufPuf 3mo ago
  There are also different CLI flags (I recall something related to building and pushing multi-arch containers) and different features supported in compose.yml. Even rootful Podman won't be fully Docker-compatible.
rgovostes 3mo ago
I've been using Podman on Mac and Linux for 3 years, and unfortunately, I have found this to be perennially true. I am willing to doggedly pursue the root cause and file bugs, but for many people it will just seem broken. Most recently: Netavark doesn't match Docker's behavior with accepting broadcast traffic on a published port.
tikkabhuna 3mo ago
Yes! It put me off Podman for years. I do now think it has some clever ideas and if you’re running RHEL it’s a no brainer, but they should be more upfront that you will have to adapt. Especially if you’re moving from rootful docker to rootless Podman.

satvikpendem 3mo ago

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.

threecheese 3mo ago
Same question, same scenario. I tried it on MacOS, and the first issue I experienced (don’t recall what it was) had me deep into Redhat forums to even understand what was happening. Switching to OrbStack was a no-brainer, but there are obvious tradeoffs from a features perspective.
chrysoprace 3mo ago
I'm not sure about macOS, but it is seamless on Linux for my use cases. One thing to note is that Podman Compose defaults to docker-compose as the provider, and I haven't used the podman-compose provider (confusingly named slightly different to Podman Compose, which is the top level abstraction on top of docker-compose or podman-compose). You can still run containers through the Docker engine with Podman, if you need to.

cdmckay 3mo ago

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.

chrisweekly 3mo ago
I liked Orbstack better than colima which was better than Docker Desktop. Then I found https://smolmachines.com's https://smolmachines.com's smolvm microvms.
- zuzululu 3mo ago
  been using orbstack but this smol stuff is interesting is this firecracker or total rewrite
  - binsquare 3mo ago
    author of smol machines here, it has no relation to firecracker. It runs ontop of the libkrun vmm forked with optimizations, which is the underlying lib powering podman as well. open source, will contribute upstream when possible: https://github.com/smol-machines/libkrun https://github.com/smol-machines/libkrun
    - glenjamin 3mo ago
      Upthread the implication seems to be that smolmachines would be in some way a replacement for orbstack to run docker containers But it seems more like a completely different way to run isolated workloads?
      - binsquare 3mo ago
        smol machines is a virtual machine, akin to firecracker but designed to run locally as well It also has container-inages support built-in with crun so you can create a VM with a container running by default. You can also just... run docker inside of it.

buredoranna 3mo ago

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)

drnick1 3mo ago
> podman doesn't spew garbage and punch holes in my firewall (iptables) The way Docker silently rewrites iptables rules is just insane. It boggles my mind that someone thought that it would be a good idea, and that it survived a peer review.
- buredoranna 3mo ago
  It was a major contributor to why I didn't learn more about containers earlier on.

himata4113 3mo ago

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.

muti 3mo ago

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)

a_t48 3mo ago

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.

LinXitoW 3mo ago

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?

yoyohello13 3mo ago
We have a consistent wsl image for everyone. So they are all on Linux. Then we have a podman pod defined in a bash script. We have a Justfile where you can run ‘just services’ and it all “just works (tm)”. Once the pod is defined you can use ‘podman pod up/down’ to interact with it, but mostly we encourage people to use the Just recipes to do the things. The thing is, podman has docker-compose like management built in, in the form of pods, but it doesn’t seem to be very well socialized. On the server we use quartet+systemd and it’s great. Never had an issue with that part.
mattdw 3mo ago
Podman can run compose - either its own, or docker-compose if you tell Podman to listen on the docker socket. I use Podman on both macos and Windows, with compose files, so I'm a bit perplexed by this whole comment.
notnullorvoid 3mo ago
I run podman for local dev containers or for isolated sandboxes mostly. Anything needing orchestration and I go straight to k8s, never liked docker compose.
pezezin 3mo ago
> Sure, if you want to be bound to one single platform (linux) Not a big deal if you are developing server software, as most servers nowadays are Linux.
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rsyring 3mo ago

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/25582 https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/discussions...

stryan 3mo ago
To be clear, it doesn't explicitly not support Ubuntu or anything, it just doesn't privilege it. Podman doesn't produce packages for any distros.
- rsyring 3mo ago
  Agreed. But, IMO, it looks like amateur hour when you compare their stance to the distro support Docker provides.
  - smarx007 3mo ago
    A slightly different perspective: Podman is made by the distro people (RedHat/Fedora). And they consider it unacceptable to mess with the software distribution channels of a distro. If Debian does not want latest Podman, they are not going to push the latest version to Debian users behind Debian repo's "back". This is a distro-to-distro respect rather than amateur hour.
    - michaelmrose 3mo ago
      I do not think this perspective is correct. You are considering official distro repos as a means to control what is allowed to be run on Debian. This is a kind of control commercial platforms often value because they use it to extract rent or to micromanage their experience that they sell to the rubes. Debian DOES care about about both experience and ethics of what is allowed to be distributed in official repos but it is contrary to the ethos of free software to care what you run on your machine or by extension what others choose to offer. You are intuiting a corporate sort of perspective where neither it nor the raison d'être for it exists.

thewisenerd 3mo ago

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/ https://www.itix.fr/blog/qemu-user-static-with-podman/ [2]: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/16024 https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/16024 , https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/work_items/3130 https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/work_items/3130 [3]: https://lima-vm.io/ https://lima-vm.io/

victor_vhv 3mo ago

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 :)

EddieB 3mo ago

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!

utopiah 3mo ago

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 https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues/792 ) is now my default container engine.

Hendrikto 3mo ago

It is a bit buried, but Podman now follows the UAPI Configuration Files Specification as well as the Base Directory Specification. This is great!