I use both Podman and Docker pretty regularly, and to be honest I don’t see a huge amount of differentiation or practical value in Podman for my day-to-day. It feels like another OCI runtime with some quirks compared to Docker.
One pain point for me is rootless mode: my Podman containers tend to stop randomly for no obvious reason. I tried the recommended “enable user lingering” fix and it didn’t help. I’ve never run into this with Docker.
I get the theoretical advantages, daemonless architecture, better systemd integration, rootless by default, podman generate kube, etc. But if you’re just using containers for development or straightforward deployments, Docker feels smoother and more reliable. Maybe if you’re in a security-sensitive environment or need tighter system integration Podman shines, but for my use cases I’m still not convinced.