Often overlooked: there is also podman machine and podman desktop (for windows and macOS). It is not as fancy as docker, but fully free and open source.
It provides docker compatibility to some extent, you don’t need a license and it’s much less heavy than docker desktop. If you need kubernetes, there is also minikube, which provides a lot of options.
Most of the things discussed in this article still apply for podman machine and minikube.
Last time I tried it, it was using sshfs mounts. Way slower than whatever Docker Desktop is using. Looks like sshfs is now unmaintained, I can't find what they're using now.
Podman has been a massive disappointment for me. I stupidly gave up my docker desktop because the company was trying to make cost savings and it was supposedly a drop-in replacement.
Some short-lived containers like our repo’s linter takes easily 4x as long to run in podman as it did with Docker. Immediately I have lost productivity.
It’s incredibly unreliable, every time I start my computer I have to podman machine stop then podman machine start because there’s something broken about how it gets initialised at startup. I’ve spent ages debugging random broken functionality.
It doesn’t support docker-compose. There’s a community project called podman-compose, but it’s not great because it won’t do stuff like build containers concurrently, and it has random weird quirks about volumes already existing when you do podman-compose up —-build whereas docker doesn’t complain for the same compose file.
Overall podman has been a massive regret for me, and I wish I hadn’t given up my docker desktop just to save a minuscule amount of money.
When did you last use it? It _does_ support docker compose. Has for a while now actually.
I love it on Linux. The Mac version is not as smooth yet, but, for my use case, still works a hell of a lot better than docker desktop. There is something deeply wrong with docker desktop's networking, and I literally have to restart it almost every time I make a change to one of our services. Not an issue with podman.
Huh this was literally 2 weeks ago I looked into this and ended up using a third-party community podman docker compose substitute. I will have another look.
Oh wow I wasn’t expecting it to work that way. I was expecting to have to use some kind of podman aliased compose alternative that copies the CLI of docker compose.
I haven’t used it much I have to admit. But I also experienced the issues you are talking about.
I thought it was because I also have docker desktop on the same machine, but probably that’s not an issue at all and it’s podman remote that is unreliable.
I want podman to be a drop-in replacement, but it just isn’t there. I’ve wasted more time running down random errors I podman, so much so that I’ve switched back. Maybe in another year or two…
It provides docker compatibility to some extent, you don’t need a license and it’s much less heavy than docker desktop. If you need kubernetes, there is also minikube, which provides a lot of options.
Most of the things discussed in this article still apply for podman machine and minikube.