4 ms·

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to support installing on Ubuntu (and other popular distros), without relying on the distro repos which are always out of date, they will

by 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to support installing on Ubuntu (and other popular distros), without relying on the distro repos which are always out of date, they will continue to lose to Docker.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.
      - smarx007 3mo ago
        > You are considering official distro repos as a means to control what is allowed to be run on Debian. I am rather considering official repos as a means to keeping your Debian system in a "supported" state. Many users, including software developers, want to only install software (or sw versions) that would not put their system in an unsupported configuration. > Debian DOES care about about both experience and ethics of what is allowed to be distributed in official repos Podman is widely distributed in official Debian repos, so ethics is not a question in this particular case. We are only talking about Debian repos being conservative with the versions of the software in the repos - not limited to Podman. Debian does not encourage users to install software from 3rd-party repos just to get a newer version of an existing package because the stability of the system (and the ability to do major version upgrades) cannot be guaranteed otherwise.
tasuki 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. Your needs are incomprehensible to me: that is exactly why I use podman: a predictable version of it is in my distro's repos. I go to docker.com and how do I even install the thing? What's "docker sandboxes"? Get the latest version of docker? Why would I want the latest version? I don't want the latest version, I want the same version as my other machines have, so things work everywhere. And I usually don't know what version that is. But I sure do know what Debian version my other machines run! Again, your needs are utterly incomprehensible to me.
- rsyring 3mo ago
  I run Ubuntu 24.04 on my laptop and servers. The Podman version is 4.9.3. It may be incompressible to you, but I'm not alone in thinking it's a problem: https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/issues/27070 https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/issues/2707...
  - jcastro 3mo ago
    I'm sorry this is happening to you. I'm on the team that helped bring podman into the CNCF and I worked on ubuntu for over a decade, this isn't a technical problem this is a business one. Podman is in universe, so Canonical doesn't care unless you pay. Fair enough, good engineers cost money. RH isn't going to pay. Podman engineers would love to be in Ubuntu, the Red Hat engineers would love to directly upload into Universe. Everything in this thread makes sense, it's a matter of who wants to pay for it. End users have been asking for this for years. The engineers don't make the decisions. Canonical doesn't want to pay, Red Hat doesn't want to pay. Users stuck in the middle. I get podman from brew even on Linux because the idea that vendors fighting over uploading tarballs to a server is stupid. Fuck distros.
    - Brybry 3mo ago
      I'm confused, the latest LTS version of Ubuntu is 26.04 (released on 2026/04/23) and has Podman v5.7.0 (released on 2025/11/11). [1] If they're on a 24.04 LTS release is there any reason they would be on a newer version of Podman (without jumping through hoops)? Ubuntu 24.04LTS released on 2024/04/25 and the Debian Import Freeze was on 2024/02/29. The bleeding edge Podman release at that time was a pre-release v5.0.0-RC3 (2024/02/22) and the latest actual release was v4.9.3 (2024/02/13). That's the version Ubuntu 24.04LTS has. [2][3][4] So aren't they on the exact version of Podman they're supposed to be on for the operating system version they're running? [1] https://packages.ubuntu.com/resolute/podman https://packages.ubuntu.com/resolute/podman [2] https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/podman https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/podman [3] https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/24.04/schedule/ https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/24.04/schedul... [4] https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/releases?page=6#release-v4.9.3 https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/releases?pa...
diffeomorphism 3mo ago
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.

by rsyring 3mo ago

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.
    - smarx007 3mo ago
      > You are considering official distro repos as a means to control what is allowed to be run on Debian. I am rather considering official repos as a means to keeping your Debian system in a "supported" state. Many users, including software developers, want to only install software (or sw versions) that would not put their system in an unsupported configuration. > Debian DOES care about about both experience and ethics of what is allowed to be distributed in official repos Podman is widely distributed in official Debian repos, so ethics is not a question in this particular case. We are only talking about Debian repos being conservative with the versions of the software in the repos - not limited to Podman. Debian does not encourage users to install software from 3rd-party repos just to get a newer version of an existing package because the stability of the system (and the ability to do major version upgrades) cannot be guaranteed otherwise.

tasuki 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. Your needs are incomprehensible to me: that is exactly why I use podman: a predictable version of it is in my distro's repos. I go to docker.com and how do I even install the thing? What's "docker sandboxes"? Get the latest version of docker? Why would I want the latest version? I don't want the latest version, I want the same version as my other machines have, so things work everywhere. And I usually don't know what version that is. But I sure do know what Debian version my other machines run! Again, your needs are utterly incomprehensible to me.

rsyring 3mo ago
I run Ubuntu 24.04 on my laptop and servers. The Podman version is 4.9.3. It may be incompressible to you, but I'm not alone in thinking it's a problem: https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/issues/27070 https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/issues/2707...
- jcastro 3mo ago
  I'm sorry this is happening to you. I'm on the team that helped bring podman into the CNCF and I worked on ubuntu for over a decade, this isn't a technical problem this is a business one. Podman is in universe, so Canonical doesn't care unless you pay. Fair enough, good engineers cost money. RH isn't going to pay. Podman engineers would love to be in Ubuntu, the Red Hat engineers would love to directly upload into Universe. Everything in this thread makes sense, it's a matter of who wants to pay for it. End users have been asking for this for years. The engineers don't make the decisions. Canonical doesn't want to pay, Red Hat doesn't want to pay. Users stuck in the middle. I get podman from brew even on Linux because the idea that vendors fighting over uploading tarballs to a server is stupid. Fuck distros.
  - Brybry 3mo ago
    I'm confused, the latest LTS version of Ubuntu is 26.04 (released on 2026/04/23) and has Podman v5.7.0 (released on 2025/11/11). [1] If they're on a 24.04 LTS release is there any reason they would be on a newer version of Podman (without jumping through hoops)? Ubuntu 24.04LTS released on 2024/04/25 and the Debian Import Freeze was on 2024/02/29. The bleeding edge Podman release at that time was a pre-release v5.0.0-RC3 (2024/02/22) and the latest actual release was v4.9.3 (2024/02/13). That's the version Ubuntu 24.04LTS has. [2][3][4] So aren't they on the exact version of Podman they're supposed to be on for the operating system version they're running? [1] https://packages.ubuntu.com/resolute/podman https://packages.ubuntu.com/resolute/podman [2] https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/podman https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/podman [3] https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/24.04/schedule/ https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/24.04/schedul... [4] https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/releases?page=6#release-v4.9.3 https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/releases?pa...

diffeomorphism 3mo ago

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.