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by boardwaalk 1731 days ago
It depends on what you mean by “replace” Docker Desktop, but Podman can run a VM on macOS and has replaced Docker Desktop for me. There’s no fancy (useless) UI nor Windows support yet though.
3 comments

Windows works via a "Bring your own VM" approach, but since WSL exists I'd expect most Windows users would just run it there
When you install Docker desktop and already have wsl2 installed you get a pop up saying “you just want us to use wsl2?” And away you go. At least that’s what happened when I did it 6 months ago. Works great!
If you don't need to run `docker` command under Windows, install docker directly from distro repo is enough. No need to run another background service. Another benefit is it is faster to build docker images when the files are large, because it doesn't need to move files between WSL VMs.
I thought there was Windows support for Podman the same way that Docker Desktop provides Windows support -- primarily through WSL2?
AFAICT podman machine relies on VirtualBox. This would be an enormous performance and resource regression on MacOS — Docker Desktop uses the much more performant and resource-conscious native hypervisor frameworks instead.
podman machine uses qemu with Hypervisor.framework on macOS
Oh, nice! Thanks for the correction.