I ditched Docker for Podman

I love podman, and, like others have said here, it does not always work with every container.

I often try to run something using podman, then find strange errors, then switch back to docker. Typically this is with some large container, like gitlab, which probably relies on the entirety of the history of docker and its quirks. When I build something myself, most of the time I can get it working under podman.

This situation where any random container does not work has forced me to spin up a VM under incus and run certain troublesome containers inside that. This isn't optimal, but keeps my sanity. I know incus now permits running docker containers and I wonder if you can swap in podman as a replacement. If I could run both at the same time, that would be magical and solve a lot of problems.

There definitely is no consistency regarding GPU access in the podman and docker commands and that is frustrating.

But, all in all, I would say I do prefer podman over docker and this article is worth reading. Rootless is a big deal.

I presume that the bulk of your issues are with container images that start their PID 1s as root. Podman is rootless by default, so this causes problems.

What you can do if you don't want to use Docker and don't want to maintain these images yourself is have two Podman machines running: one in rootful mode and another in rootless mode. You can, then, use the `--connection` global flag to specify the machine you want your container to run in. Podman can also create those VMs for you if you want it to (I use lima and spin them myself). I recommend using --capabilities to set limits on these containers namespaces out of caution.

Podman Desktop also installs a Docker compatibility layer to smooth over these incompatibilities.

Is there a blog post on this somewhere? I'd really love to read more about it beyond just the official documentation.