That's not accurate. There was an older project called podman-machine, which is long gone. What you get when you use the `podman machine` command is a completely new implementation.
So is a Vagrant-based alternative the current solution? Vagrant seems like it's long been a 'maintenance only' project for Hashicorp, though not abandoned at least.
Lima is a new and better option for this, it does not use a bundled Ruby runtime and does not use anything from Oracle. Just Go and QEMU... See https://github.com/lima-vm/lima
I believe there are hypervisor.framework backends for vagrant, but it seems that for whatever reason they haven’t taken off? I’m not exactly sure why they haven’t become the default on Mac, given how much more efficient it presumably is.
"Fast forward a couple of months, podman-machine is now deprecated in lieu of Vagrant"