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by gizdan 1731 days ago
From what I've seen in all these Podman articles, I've come to the same conclusion as you.

This is how Podman fits in:

Podman (and its various components) can replace everything but parts of Docker Desktop, namely the GUI that Docker Desktop, has. For everything else, it has it's own Docker compatible CLI, an optional daemon (by default it's daemonless), there is no containerd component as it communicates directly to any OCI compatible runtime. They've also implemented their own OCI compatible runtime, crun, which is supposed to be faster than runc, and more lightweight.

I suppose for the average Joe/Jane this probably doesn't matter. They want to run a few commands the first time around to set up, and then do "start/stop/remove my container" and that's all they want to do.
3 comments
amarshall 1731 days ago
Docker Desktop isn’t really about the GUI so much as the management of, and host integration with, a Linux VM for running on non-Linux OSes. Notably, there’s no Docker Desktop for Linux, only macOS and Windows.
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gizdan 1731 days ago
Yep. Podman takes cares of those things using the `podman machine` sub-command. From what I understand, currently only macOS might be working, but Windows support will be coming if it's not already there.
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studmuffin650 1731 days ago
the only issue really left is that volume mounts don't work with podman machine as of yet. The issue has been live on github for awhile, but its finally getting traction. Likely because of the recent Docker for Desktop changes.

EDIT: github link: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/8016

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otterley 1731 days ago
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.
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SirGiggles 1731 days ago
This doesn't seem accurate.

According to a post on the podman website: "Current implementation relies on qemu which currently has some platform dependencies." [1]

I also just checked on my machine and it is indeed running on Qemu.

IIRC Qemu also has support for Apple's Hypervisor.framework.

[1] https://podman.io/community/meeting/notes/2021-04-06/#podman...

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otterley 1731 days ago
You are correct - thanks!
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letmeinhere 1731 days ago
If true, also untenable since last I checked VBox doesn't plan to support ARM hosts (including the new Mac chipset)
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darkwater 1731 days ago
> Notably, there’s no Docker Desktop for Linux, only macOS and Windows.

Looks like they are adding it https://twitter.com/glours/status/1438526841577357315

I quote: "A dream coming true for a lot of #linux users, @dieuthicao announced that we’ll start working on a #Linux version of @docker Desktop"

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amarshall 1731 days ago
What does Docker Desktop even really offer on Linux? k8s, I guess? There are other open-source (Docker Desktop is proprietary ofc) ways to do that.

As a Linux user, far from a dream at all, really.

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jhickok 1731 days ago
My understanding is that Podman is working on a "GUI" since it is one of the most requested items. Taken from the interview with the founders of Podman over on the Google Kubernetes podcast: https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/164-podman/

ETA: Oh hey here it is: https://github.com/heyvito/podman-macos

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gizdan 1731 days ago
Good to know about the GUI!

> ETA: Oh hey here it is: https://github.com/heyvito/podman-macos

This GUI isn't an official Podman application. It's a third party. Not that it's bad or anything, it's just not official.

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jhickok 1731 days ago
Yeah true. They talk about a first party app on the podcast episode tho, I'm just not smart enough to find it.
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KronisLV 1731 days ago
> For everything else...

Except for:

  - Docker Compose (because podman-compose has a large amount of open issues https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues)
  - Docker Swarm (since Docker provides a lightweight orchestrator out of the box), you'd need to use something like K3s or another Kubernetes distro
  - anything that uses the Docker socket (/var/run/docker.sock), so you can forget about running anything like Portainer or any of the other tools out there
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slrz 1731 days ago
No longer true. Podman nowadays ships with an optional daemon that serves a Docker-compatible interface, so you can use docker-compose directly if that's what you want.

See for example: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-docker-compose

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KronisLV 1731 days ago
That does seem better! Of course, there are a few lingering issues with support, but overall the trend is good: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%...

Of course, there's no Swarm support, as evidenced by that very article:

> Caveats

> One known caveat is that Podman has not and will not implement the Swarm function. Therefore, if your Docker Compose instance uses Swarm, it will not work with Podman.

Feels like people will either be pigeonholed into Kubernetes for all of their deployments, or will have to migrate over to something like Hashicorp Nomad: https://www.nomadproject.io/

Curiously, it also supports Podman as a task driver: https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/drivers/podman

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