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Reasons to Drop Docker for Podman

developers.redhat.com

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Re: Reasons to Drop Docker for Podman

#31

Anyone using Podman on a macOS? How's the experience compared to Docker Desktop?

There are some problems especially with the QEMU integration. E.g. two bugs that irritated me immensely:

* podman with --network host won't expose the ports.

* If you suspend the laptop the time on the VM goes haywire.

I always found docker to be unreasonably buggy too so am not sure how I feel about this.

Re: Reasons to Drop Docker for Podman

#34
post #11

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.

Even Docker Desktop for Mac works pretty great and they improved the startup. Not really had issues to warrant switching.

Docker for Desktop got better.

I think VirtioFS fixed most unbearable fs slowness.

But Rancher Desktop also got better and I just cannot understand why I would use Docker for Desktop instead of the Open Sourced Rancher Desktop.

Re: Reasons to Drop Docker for Podman

#35

Anyone using Podman on a macOS? How's the experience compared to Docker Desktop?

> Anyone using Podman on a macOS? How's the experience compared to Docker Desktop? Don't forget there is also Rancher Desktop[1] [1] https://rancherdesktop.io

Why would one use Docker for Desktop when Rancher Desktop exists?

Re: Reasons to Drop Docker for Podman

#36

Was interested to see if Podman is a shiny new technology or a likely replacement of docker?

It does has some quirks that is why I keep using docker for containers on servers. I do use podman daily in the form of distrobox since both the steam deck and my desktop are immutable systems.

I really wanted to like immutable OS and Distrobox but I’ve run into so many issues and there are just some things that are significantly harder to do inside a container. Not to mention the subtle differences between podman and docker and it’s just too much tinkering for me when I’m trying to actively work on a project.

As much as it pains me to say this, I think nixos might be my next path.

Re: Reasons to Drop Docker for Podman

#37
post #7

What problem does Docker's daemon actually solve? To me it always felt over-engineered.

Having a daemon is inherently faster, period. I was disappointed by Podman because almost all operations including `podman ps`, `podman run` were slower than their Docker counterparts. After many releases Podman got faster, but still not on a par with Docker.

Re: Reasons to Drop Docker for Podman

#38

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.

You think all programmers are HN-level passionate?

Most of my colleagues don't know what a ssh public key is used for.

Re: Reasons to Drop Docker for Podman

#39

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.

My guess is Kubernetes would be the way to go here? You can run k3s locally.

Or kind.

And use Skaffold or Tilt to manage it all.

This setup makes Docker Compose look like a toy.

Developers should stop with this impedence mismatch of using Docker Compose when developing and K8s in prod.

Re: Reasons to Drop Docker for Podman

#40

Anyone using Podman on a macOS? How's the experience compared to Docker Desktop?

It works well, but I found I had to configure several items inside the VM to get it to work within our corporate environment. Timezones, ntpd, proxy, and arm64/amd64 cross platform all needed me to tweak some stuff. But that was quite a while ago and may be fixed now.

Colima on the other hand works pretty much seamlessly, but really works best on macOS Ventura because you can enable vz virtualization.

Edited to add: colima works seamlessly on the command line. So if you're command-line-averse, you'll need to learn some new commands and things won't be as convenient. I haven't tried rancher desktop yet.

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