I've tried Podman for a few weeks, and I have to say that first experience is fine, I get that there are some differences in the setup. Aaaand then you come across all sorts of the small and medium cross-incompatibilities (flags, parameter handling, different syntax parsing, drivers..), long standing bugs, Podman Compose is at least subjectively poorly supported/aims at compatibility at all, the list goes on. Docker itself isn't perfect, but it's totally not such a mess.