I ditched Docker for Podman

The main issue is podman support on Ubuntu. Ubuntu ships outdated podman versions that don't work out of the box. So I use podman v5, GitHub actions uses podman v3, and my coworkers on Ubuntu use docker. So now my script must work with old podman, recent podman and docker

Additionally, there aren't even any trusted repos out there building/publishing a .deb for it. The ones that I could find when I searched last were all outdated or indicated they were not going to keep moving forward.

I could get over this. But, IMO, it lends itself to asking the "why" question. Why wouldn't Podman make installing it easier? And the only thing that makes sense to me is that RedHat doesn't want their dev effort supporting their competitor's products.

That's a perfectly reasonable stance, they owe me nothing. But, it does make me feel that anything not in the RH ecosystem is going to be treated as a second-class citizen. That concerns me more than having to build my own debs.

They publish statically-linked binaries on GitHub [0], so to install it, you just need to download and unpack a single file. But you don't get any automatic updates like you would if they provided an apt repository.

[0]: https://github.com/containers/podman/releases