Podman rocks for me!
I find docker hard to use and full of pitfalls and podman isn't any worse. On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win!
Was this a deal breaker for any company?
I ask because the Docker Desktop paid license requirement is quite reasonable. If you have less than 250 employees and make less than $10 million in annual revenue it's free.
If you have a dev team of 10 people and are extremely profitable to where you need licenses you'd end up paying $9 a year per developer for the license. So $90 / year for everyone, but if you have US developers your all-in payroll is probably going to be over $200,000 per developer or roughly $2 million dollars. In that context $90 is practically nothing. A single lunch for the dev team could cost almost double that.
To me that is a bargain, you're getting an officially supported tool that "just works" on all operating systems.
Most Mac users I see using it struggle to see the difference between "image" and "container". Complete lack of understanding.
All the same stuff can easily be done from cli.
It runs qemu under the hood if you want to run x86 (or sparc or mips!) instead of arm on a newer mac.
Which would be great if it worked reliably, or had any documentation at all for when it breaks. But it doesn't and it doesn't.
But second -- I use colima lots, on my home macs and my work macs, and it mostly just works. The profiles stuff is kinda annoying and I find myself accidentally running arm when I want x86, or other tedious config issues crop up. But it actually has been easier to live with than docker desktop where I'd run out of space and things would fall apart.
Docker on MacOS is broadly going work poorly relative to it on linux, just from having to run the docker stuff in a linux vm that's hiding somewhere behind the scenes.
If you find too much friction with any of these, probably it's easier to just run a linux vm on the mac and interact with docker in the 'native' environment. I've found UTM to be quite a bit easier to live with than virtualbox.
Most software has issues, but Colima is noticeably worse than most software I've used. And the complete lack of documentation is definitely not normal.