I would love to hear everyone’s opinion.
If you don’t have strong opinions one way or the other, then docker is the easy answer. Way, way more widespread, which generally tends to mean better docs, more guides and examples, more tooling and open-source support…
I like podman because rootless and daemonless are built-in and default. Yes, it can be done on docker, but you have to do a bunch of shit to get it set up.
You could create the alias
alias docker="podman"and 99% of the time, you won’t even be able to tell the difference since podman is a docker drop in replacement. All the docker documentation applies to podman as well. But since docker runs as root by default, some edge cases might not work out of the box (like binding to a port on the host less than 1000).Podman comes with some neat tools like being able to create systemd service files to start and stop containers as services.
To use docker-compose, you’ll need some additional packages. That’s probably the biggest drawback to podman imo. Podman wants to use pods instead of docker-compose, but I think they gotta take their heads out of their asses and just support the more popular format on that one. Not to mention docker-compose is just plain better imo. Easier to define, easier to understand, easier to modify. The list goes on and on.
You could create the alias alias docker=“podman”
There’s even an official Debian package that takes care of this for you: https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/podman-docker
That package actually does a bit more than that! If you don’t need all the extras, then I say just add the alias and be done with it.
I use podman with the podman-docker compatibility layer and native docker-compose. Podman + podman-docker is a drop-in replacement for actual docker. You can run all the regular docker commands and it will work. If you run it as rootful, it behaves in exactly the same way. Docker-compose will work right on top of it.
I prefer this over native Docker because I get the best of both worlds. All the tutorials and guides for Docker work just fine, but at the same time I can explore Podman’s rootless containers. Plus I enjoy it’s integration with Cockpit.
Podman is significantly better if you want to leverage the Systemd integration it has out of the box.
But if you just want to run existing docker-compose scripts then Docker is easier.
I would say Docker. There is no substantial benefit in running podman, while docker is a widely adopted tool (which means more tooling in the ecosystem, easier to find answers to questions etc.). The difference is not huge tbh, and some time ago the biggest advantage for podman was being able to run rootless, while docker was stuck with a root daemon. This is not the case anymore (docker can run rootless), so I would say unless you have some specific argument to use podman, stick with docker.
I use Docker exclusively. Podman is the NIH syndrome response to an industry standard. It has its benefits but Docker just works.
Podman wasn’t built due to NIH. Docker has real problems (though many have been fixed), and Podman was built to fix those.
Docker Engine is open source. They could’ve easily contributed patches to it which just further proves that it is a NIH syndrome response.
The Podman developers did contribute to Docker for a while before starting the project. Docker kept introducing issues and had some fundamentally bad design decisions that they didn’t want to change.
At least try to look into the history of these things before making broad and easily falsifiable statements.
What no love for Incus round these parts?
Because the lxc way is inherently different from the docker/podman way. It’s aimed at running full systems, rather than mono process containers. It has it’s use cases, but they are not as common IMHO.
Real men use Incus NixOS containers for reproducible builds instead of wimpy dockerfiles 😤😤
/s – for real though, I hope someday you finally remove the stick from where the sun doesn’t shine ;)
Did it sound cold? Because I didn’t mean that, I just meant to actually answer the question from my PoV. Just for the record, I also did not down vote you.
So yeah, use whatever footgun you prefer, I don’t judge :)
They both kind of suck in their own way.
If you want to things to run at startup and you’re not on systemd, rootless docker is probably easier.
Otherwise podman is mostly fine but be careful of native overlay if you’re not on BTRFS, this causes some pretty long build times.
