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I ditched Docker for Podman

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171–180 of 670 posts

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#171
post #46
post #21

To provide 1 contrary opinion to all the others saying they have a problem: Podman rocks for me! I find docker hard to use and full of pitfalls and podman isn't any worse. On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win!

> On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win! Was this a deal breaker for any company? I ask because the Docker Desktop paid license requirement is quite reasonable. If you have less than 250 employees and make less than $10 million in annual revenue it's free. If you have a dev team of 10 people and are extremely profitable to where you need licenses you'd end up paying $9…

Companies aren't monoliths, they're made of teams.

Big companies are made of teams of teams.

The little teams don't really get to make purchasing decisions.

If there's a free alternative, little teams just have to suck it up and try to make it work.

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Also consider that many of these expenses are born by the 'cost center' side of the house, that is, the people who don't make money for the company.

If you work in a cost center, the name of the game is saving money by cutting expenses.

If technology goes into the actual product, the cost for that is accounted for differently.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#172
post #21

To provide 1 contrary opinion to all the others saying they have a problem: Podman rocks for me! I find docker hard to use and full of pitfalls and podman isn't any worse. On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win!

You only have to worry about licences if you use Docker DESKTOP. Why not use RANCHER Desktop?

I have been using it by years. Tested it in Win11 and Linux Mint. I can have even a local kubernetes.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#173
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Mac we just switched to podman and didn't have anything to worry about.

Anyone have opinions on OrbStack for mac over these other alternatives?

It's well worth it its much more than a gui for it supports running k8s locally, managing custom vm instances, resource monitoring of containers, built in local domain name support with ssl mycontainer.orb, a debug shell that gives you ability to install packages that are not available in the image by default, much better and automated volume mounting and view every container in finder, ability to query logs, an amazing ui, plus it is much, much faster and more resource efficient.

The above features really do make it worth it especially when using existing services that have complicated failure logs or are resource intensive like redis, postgres, livekit, etc or you have a lot of ports running and want to call your service without having to worry about remembering port numbers or complicated docker network configuration.

Check it out https://docs.orbstack.dev/

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#174
post #46
post #21

To provide 1 contrary opinion to all the others saying they have a problem: Podman rocks for me! I find docker hard to use and full of pitfalls and podman isn't any worse. On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win!

> On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win! Was this a deal breaker for any company? I ask because the Docker Desktop paid license requirement is quite reasonable. If you have less than 250 employees and make less than $10 million in annual revenue it's free. If you have a dev team of 10 people and are extremely profitable to where you need licenses you'd end up paying $9…

for reference a jp dev will be paid around $50,000. most of the world will probably be in the 10k-50k range except a few places (switzerland, luxembourg, usa?).

atlassian and google and okta and ghe and this and that (claude code?). that eventually starts to stack up.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#175
post #77

To bikeshed a little, "Why I Ditched Docker for Podman, And Why You Should Too" would be better than the current headline of "Why I Ditched Docker for Podman (And You Should Too)": the "you should too" part is after all the main message of the article, not a side-point.

I'm a fan of grammatical radicalism, the parens are appropriate if they're meant to convey a certain tone/voice in the writing, like a quick added-in-fragment after you're done saying the original title (as if you were giving a presentation).

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OrbStack looks pretty nice, BUT an $8/mo/user subscription? Blech.

vs $11 for docker? blech

Honestly just the debug shell alone is worth a good amount of $. You can remotely run shell commands on your deployed docker container and install packages that are not available in the base image without modifying the base image which can be a life saver.

https://docs.orbstack.dev/features/debug

Let alone the local resource monitor, increased, performance, automated local domains (no more complicated docker network settings to get your app working with local host), and more.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#177
Podman is really painful if you do anything interesting inside of a container, it's great and simple if all you're doing is running nginx or a scripting language runtime or something in a container, but for folks who write actual software that gets compiled to target a system and utilizes syscalls, running in Podman is a pain in the ass unless you disable most of the "benefits". Docker on the other hand pretty much just works.

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#179

Docker is failing in that trap where they feel the need to try (and mostly fail so far) to add net-new value streams (e.g. mcp catalogue, a bunch of other stuff i immediately turned off that last time i installed it) rather than focus on the core value. It's not the case that they've maximised the utility of the core build / publish container nor the acquire / run container workflows and but they're prioritising fluf…

The core of docker needs to be free. The docker registry can charge corporate customers for storage and such, but besides being the default registry, there's not much money there because it's a commodity service, not anything unique.

There's just not much money to be made there, especially considering that docker is a pretty thin wrapper built on top of a bunch of other free technology.

When somebody can make a meaningful (though limited) clone of your core product in 100 lines of bash, you can't make much of a business on top of it [1]

Docker suffers from being useful in the open source space but having no reasonable method to make revenue.

https://github.com/p8952/bocker

Re: I ditched Docker for Podman

#180
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Mac we just switched to podman and didn't have anything to worry about.

Anyone have opinions on OrbStack for mac over these other alternatives?

Yes, Orbstack is significantly better than Docker Desktop, and probably also better than any other Docker replacement out there right now (for macOS), if you aren't bothered by the (reasonable) pricing.

It costs about $100/year per seat for commercial use, IIRC. But it is significantly faster than Docker Desktop at literally everything, has a way better UI, and a bunch of QoL features that are nice. Plus Linux virtualization that is both better and (repeating on this theme) significantly more performant than Parallels or VMWare Fusion or UTM.

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