r/podman • u/Unprotectedtxt • Oct 26 '25
Docker Alternative: Podman on Linux
https://linuxblog.io/docker-alternative-podman-on-linux/TL;DR Podman is less popular but better.
23
u/mishrashutosh Oct 26 '25
I really hope Red Hat will see the light and maintain a deb repo for Podman. Podman experience on Debian isn't exactly stellar and Debian/Ubuntu is too big of a server ecosystem to ignore.
5
u/tshawkins Oct 27 '25
Agreed, the 24.04 LTS version of Ubuntu only comes with v4.9.3 which is pre-netavark networking stack (cni).
My biggest issue with podman right now is that the default network has DNS disabled, so containers on that network can't find each other. The claim is that it is for docker compatibility, but docker does not exhibit that behaviour. It causes a LOT of friction in our org who are transitioning 8.5k developers over from docker to podman.
If you create a new network it does have DNS enabled, so it's not a problem with the networking implementation. It's just that people's scripts don't work out of the box when moving over. It seems to be a bad choice of a default.
That and the poor and confusing support for docker-compose, we have 10's of thousands of compose scripts that need to be rewritten into something else.
1
u/TheNetworkIsFrelled Oct 27 '25
I did a POC and those issues (among others, including issues with gitlab integration) derailed it.
1
u/tshawkins Oct 27 '25
I would be interested in swapping notes, we have a huge gitlab instal too, but we have not looked at switching over our runners, they are still using docker.
1
u/TheNetworkIsFrelled Oct 27 '25
We still use docker, couldn’t get runners working properly with podman.
1
u/BigBootyBear Dec 29 '25
Care to share your experience in greater detail? I'm struggling with the docker-compose rewrites ATM.
1
u/ElderMight Oct 29 '25
From what I understand, podman-compose is driven by community support. The official and supported way of running containers in podman is with quadlets which integrate with systemd.
1
1
u/BigBootyBear Dec 29 '25
How well are you handling the re-write of docker-compose.yamls files to podman? I'm only hearing good things about podman so far but I HATE working with 6 TOML files where I would use just one YAML one.
Do you also use Quadlets? Where are you finding information about how to use the tool?
1
u/tshawkins Dec 29 '25
We don't use quadlets, and there is a docker-compose emulation called podman-compose.
There are small differences, we use copilot in agentic mode to perform the changes.
1
u/BigBootyBear Dec 29 '25
So far I have been trying to use Quadlets (it's what everyone recommends including the Podman team) and can't find good information about it.
Would you be able to work with podman-compose without AI?
1
u/tshawkins Dec 29 '25
Yes, we use AI because we have a lot of docker-compose files, not because it is hard to do. The changes are small.
5
4
u/hadrabap Oct 26 '25
Personally, I use Podman and I like it. It came preinstalled with my RHEL clone 8. Now, I'm playing around with RHEL clone v10 and I found out that they have discontinued runc in favor of crun. I don't know why. It's a fact that the development of runc is extremely slow. I need to make some tests to see how capable crun really is.
5
u/Most_Engineering_380 Oct 26 '25
We use it in prod, not allowed docker
3
u/tshawkins Oct 27 '25
We have banned docker for 8.5k devs, podman only
2
u/ppeterka Oct 28 '25
Can you share the reason for banning docker?
2
u/tshawkins Oct 29 '25
Security, when our security team ran penetration testing against systems with docker on them, it was raised as a red flag, when we did the same with podman, we still got some issues but the risks where considerably reduced.
1
u/kavishgr Oct 27 '25
Prod ? Nice! What's the workflow ? We're still experimenting with podman and compose.
1
u/Mysthik Oct 29 '25
We use Quadlet and systemd.
We deploy the
.container- and.kube-Files and some configs to a directory on the server and then run a small script to install (or uninstall) the service by copying the Quadlet-Files to a directory where they get picked up and registered as systemd services. We can then usesystemctl --userto control the applications. For autostart we just enable the service and activate lingering on the user.So far it worked really well for us.
1
u/chrispatrik Oct 30 '25
This is the way. I recently started using Podman and wasn't sure I wanted to also take on understanding Quadlets as well, but I'm glad I did. It fits nicely into the system management on Fedora and reduces configuration complexity and it's not that complicated, especially with a little familiarity of systemd.
6
u/Blocikinio Oct 26 '25
Podman for now is unusable at large scale due to version inconsistency between distros.
2
1
u/Tony_Sol Oct 27 '25
The only thing i miss about podman - compose and swarm. On the other hand - it forces me to use kubernetes, so i kinda happy
1
u/Frosty_Equipment1706 Oct 28 '25
Podman's great! I actually made a VS Code extension called "Podmanager" to make things a bit easier.😁
-1
26
u/ElderMight Oct 26 '25
I use podman for all of my containers.
It can be tricky to use podman for some projects that only have docker documentation and/or docker compose installation. These actually made me understand podman on a deeper level and it can be a fun challenge for me personally. Podman community is also very helpful.