[rtempaccount1]

Podman when not run as root has some significant drawbacks (e.g. containers can't communicate with each other). That's not specific to podman it's just hard to do without root.

Podman has long running processes as well, there's a podman process that'll run once you've launched at least one containner, and a conmon for each container (equivalent to containerd-shim)

Packaged directly... it is by RH and SUSE, don't think by debian/ubuntu. At least for ubuntu, 20.04 packages Docker 19.03 just fine.

[Macha]

Containers within the same pod can certainly communicate with each other without root? I'm running that setup right now for my graylog container and it's mongo and elastic search dependencies

[rtempaccount1]

Within the same pod sure, they share the same netns. I was talking about individual container comms.

With rootless podman they use slirp4netns and all get the same IP, with rootful podman or Docker a bridge network is established so that containers that aren't in the same pod can communicate with each other.