from Hacker News

Podman Desktop 1.6 released: Even more Kubernetes and Containers features

by twelvenmonkeys on 12/20/23, 2:36 PM with 81 comments

  • by enragedcacti on 12/20/23, 3:21 PM

    Does anyone have resources or advice for someone interested in podman as a replacement for docker-compose? There is a lot I like about podman but my previous exposure to kubernetes felt extremely complicated for my use cases.

    Most of the time my docker-compose projects only need to run on one or two machines without much horizontal scaling or fault tolerance and portability/ease of spin-up are more important than high 9s edge cases.

    If that's my use case should I just stick with docker-compose, or does podman simplify kubernetes config enough that its worth considering the switch? I'd like the flexibility of being able to deploy to a k8s cluster if the cost is cheap in terms of mental overhead and how easy it is for another developer to pick up and run with.

  • by TrickardRixx on 12/20/23, 4:26 PM

    I like to develop with VS Code and devcontainers. I've never been able to get that setup to work with podman as the backend. Has anyone successfully done this or perhaps know of a blog detailing how to accomplish this that I haven't been able to find?

  • by pxc on 12/20/23, 4:01 PM

    Just recently set up Podman Desktop on Mac for work (on my old computer, I'd used Rancher Desktop on Windows).

    Getting everything installed was a little bit annoying, since I use a nonstandard Homebrew prefix, and Homebrew doesn't currently provide a 'cask' for the pre-built Podman binaries. That means that `brew install --cask podman-desktop` requires building a bunch of things from source for me. But writing one wasn't hard, and the install process was good after that.

    One issue I seem to have consistently though is that the VM `podman machine` uses hangs. I haven't investigated it, but I think it might hang every time my laptop sleeps, because it's most often hung when I come back to my computer in the mornings, and that seems so damn near every time.

    Anyone else have this problem on macOS?

  • by goalieca on 12/20/23, 3:24 PM

    I'm a very happy podman user. It works really well to run amd64 containers on aarm64 thanks to qemu and it also has great modern features like rootless.

  • by cpressland on 12/20/23, 3:06 PM

    I might look at switching our users over to Podman, considerably less bloat than Docker Desktop. Installing Docker Desktop is a PITA via MDM as it requires the user to have admin rights on first launch (unless they follow additional steps)

  • by jpeeler on 12/20/23, 8:44 PM

    I did not realize a Flatpak exists (apparently for several years): https://flathub.org/apps/io.podman_desktop.PodmanDesktop

    It's an electron app, so if you're on Wayland executing like this will make it look decent: flatpak run io.podman_desktop.PodmanDesktop --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland (after also enabling the wayland socket permission).

  • by filereaper on 12/20/23, 4:53 PM

    Podman is still considered experimental with KinD clusters.

    I wish more efforts were spent getting better integration with KinD clusters as they're much easier to spinup and work with.

  • by jasonjayr on 12/20/23, 3:47 PM

    IIRC, on windows, podman(+ docker) desktop create a Linux HyperV VM, and run the containers on that.

    As a Linux native dropped into Windows, I've already been able to bring up docker, podman, k8s, and anything else in linux with more control over the linux VM I've created.

    What does the 'Desktop' version of docker or podman bring to windows, that I don't already have by shelling into my on-device VM and using docker/podman tools directly?

  • by dissident_coder on 12/20/23, 4:27 PM

    Does it support working with a custom default system connection yet? I use podman in parallels because I get way better performance than with the qemu podman machine but podman desktop hasn’t worked with it so I stick to the cli which works seamlessly.

  • by candiddevmike on 12/20/23, 3:03 PM

    I can't find what the underlying OS is on the website, how do you know what version it is/how is the underlying OS updated?

  • by alberth on 12/20/23, 4:29 PM

    How does OrbStack compare; anyone tried it yet?

    The website makes some big claims.

    https://orbstack.dev/

    EDIT: why the downvotes?

  • by I_am_tiberius on 12/20/23, 5:20 PM

    I just read Podman, went on the website, saw the brew install command, opened the app and noticed it's not a podcast client.