Should I bother learning Podman?

Meow.tar.gz@lemmy.goblackcat.com to Linux@lemmy.ml – 64 points –

I am already fairly comfortable using docker and its tool set. Is the tide shifting towards Podman? Should I start learning how to use Podman? Thanks in advance.

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I can't help but laugh at this.

"learn how to use podman" from someone who already knows docker is their happy path.

https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/index.html#what-is-podman

Most users can simply alias Docker to Podman (alias docker=podman) without any problems

Seriously, the only two problems i've had are:

  1. makefile doesn't honor the alias
  2. need to restart the VM occasionally

I would consider myself a very beginning docker user so I've a long way to go but I can see, given that I am a beginner, it might make sense to pivot now to Podman.

It might be easier to learn some docker first. That's what all the documentation is written for and I've found the "alias docker to podman and call it a day" approach to be overly optimistic.

conversely, switching now means he'll be learning domain specific knowledge for podman, the thing he wants to work in, and not building it in docker, the thing he's trying to move away from

That's certainly possible. I'm just saying it may be faster to learn docker and then learn the differences, given the abundance of docker documentation that exists.

I did need to install some additional stuff to get docker-compose working with podman, and I needed to make sure I ran those things as a user instead of as root to make sure that the containers created by docker-compose were running rootless. But I do have my Lemmy instance running with rootless containers using podman.

My next step is to convert it to a systemd service, but I just haven't got there yet.

That’s the claim but buildx is extremely limited on podman.

But is it really a drop-in replacement for docker? Networking seems fundamentally different.

I tried to use a docker compose file for Wordpress as an example, with nginx-proxy-manager in another compose file. They're linked together through an external network.

Podman works differently. You're expected to create 'pods'. I'm not super clear on this (just dipping my toes) but podman seems to be an alternative to k8s, not docker.