from Hacker News

Reasons to Drop Docker for Podman

by richardpetersen on 8/6/23, 9:07 AM with 97 comments

  • by Hippocrates on 8/6/23, 11:55 AM

    This reads like an AI generated article. It covers some differences like pulling images with a gui vs a cli. Ok… thats incredibly unimportant.
  • by stabbles on 8/6/23, 11:17 AM

    What problem does Docker's daemon actually solve? To me it always felt over-engineered.
  • by jackweirdy on 8/6/23, 11:29 AM

    If you want to use podman some of the more recent podman versions on Ubuntu or Debian, I have a kind of hacky PPA up here - https://github.com/notbobthebuilder/podman

    GitHub actions auto build new version releases for me so major versions become available as soon as they are released and I click the button

  • by Zariff on 8/6/23, 11:14 AM

    I don’t think I understand the author completely. First, she mentions that Podman is not a replacement for Docker but then mentions multiple reasons why Podman is better than Docker. I.e. why you should replace Docker with Podman.

    What did the author mean by Podman is not a replacement of Docker?

  • by thiht on 8/6/23, 1:15 PM

    I tried Podman on 2 MacBook Pros: my personal one (Intel) and my work one (M1) and it basically doesn’t work well at all.

    Podman Desktop simply doesn’t work, on first run it loops forever on initializing stuff (I guess it tries to create the Podman machine but fails? No idea because it doesn’t say what’s wrong, nor where to look). So I tried Podman bare without Podman desktop and it’s not a lot better, the machine starts fine and I can run containers, but every time my computer wakes up from hibernate, the containers and the machine are stuck. I have to recreate the whole Podman machine from scratch.

    I loved the idea of rootless but it doesn’t work on Mac. And I won’t believe I’m the only person having the exact same set of issues on 2 different MacBooks

  • by ac130kz on 8/6/23, 12:46 PM

    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.
  • by mikewang on 8/6/23, 1:28 PM

    I came accross a lot of such info from redhat. And I tried podman which is not bad because my scenario was not complicated. But days before, I tried podman-compose which behaved so poor. That's a pitty. After years, podman's ecosystem is so poor. I don't want to be trapped by sorts of small/hidden pitfalls. I have to switch back docker then. The quality prevails, not the advertisement. PS: I did not read the passage. The title is enough.
  • by bsenftner on 8/6/23, 12:32 PM

    I started using docker a bit late, only about 3 years ago. My big question is if it is common knowledge that Docker Desktop creates a separate VM in which one's Docker Engine runs, not your host running Docker, but that VM inside your host. That separate VM indirection does not appear to be common knowledge, especially for 3rd party developers, because utilities that are supposed to work with Docker only work without Docker Desktop, or are unaware of Docker Desktop's VM and when installed claim there is no Docker on the host. It's really messed up, and as I tried to figure out what was going on I find nobody recognizes this gargantuan difference between these implementations with and without the "desktop" Docker is internally significantly different, requiring completely different runtime configurations for 3rd party integration.
  • by Etheryte on 8/6/23, 11:20 AM

    Small fyi, the site seems to break the back button on mobile.
  • by da39a3ee on 8/6/23, 12:06 PM

    I'm surprised to see RedHat thinking that programmers will prefer a desktop GUI interface to CLI for operations like starting containers. I thought that thinking had died out 20 years ago and that even Java and Windows people understood that it wasn't what programmers wanted.
  • by methou on 8/6/23, 1:34 PM

    After the license shxt show I'm a bit skeptical on using anything from Redhat now.
  • by nullify88 on 8/6/23, 11:27 AM

    Recently switched back to Docker Desktop from Podman Desktop since Docker Desktop seems to integrate better with Windows.

    Good progress though and I'll revisit it again soon.

  • by ghusto on 8/6/23, 5:05 PM

    Seemed great when I first tried it, but I ran into inconveniences I wasn't willing to put up with (can't remember exactly what they were, but I think all involved pulling from registries).

    Colima on the other hand, is install-and-forget (so much so that I had to look up what it was called again). It uses Lima, which means you can do more with it it if you want.

  • by arun-mani-j on 8/6/23, 1:53 PM

    > Podman is a cloud-native

    What does cloud-native mean actually?

  • by esamatti on 8/6/23, 11:29 AM

    Anyone using Podman on a macOS? How's the experience compared to Docker Desktop?
  • by polski-g on 8/6/23, 11:49 AM

    It doesn't work as a 100% replacement but I'd really like to switch. They need to work on better docker compose compatibility. Anything with custom network settings and it pukes.
  • by lstep1234 on 8/6/23, 11:37 AM

    Too bad, podman, technically is not bad, but IBM/Redhat made it too (voluntarily?) dependent on Redhat ecosystem.
  • by richardpetersen on 8/6/23, 9:13 AM

    Was interested to see if Podman is a shiny new technology or a likely replacement of docker?
  • by Fire-Dragon-DoL on 8/6/23, 5:27 PM

    Waiting for podman to support ports <= 1024