[lmeyerov]

Yep. We got burned out on the lies RHEL8 pushed to serious orgs (utilities, gov agencies, etc.) around podman readiness & replaceability over docker. I'm glad people are getting their bonuses and good for docker to have competition, but don't abuse your trusted advisor & monopoly position to mess with societal infrastructure and the admins keeping it going. Before we promoted other OS's for our AI users as a matter of general GPU readiness but were game for supporting RHEL, but now we actively recommend against it as too untrustworthy going forward.

[ungamedplayer]

I feel you could run docker on rhel 8. How was having an option worse?

[lmeyerov]

What is a few clickthroughs for the owner of a home box or regular co box can be weeks for teams or even a deal breaker in critical envs that are locked down. The money people know where the money comes from when making strategic decisions of what to make easy vs hard.

They made docker hard for regulated environments while making their broken competitor built-in and then marketed theirs as a replacement. This incurs all sorts of costs in schedule + $$$ + reliability where teams are pushed to figuring out if podman works in their case ("why wouldn't it?") + when not, start over with an unnecessarily complicated round of change management steps for enabling docker from centos7.

RHEL/IBM are allowed to use their trusted OS position to be anti-competitive and overall non-neutral for above-OS layers, and to the clear harm of customer. But I am also allowed to say we shouldn't trust & tolerate such a provider for vendor-neutral infra in regulated environments. Secure infra is important and podman is pushing docker on important areas here, so it's been disappointing to see the one-step-forward two-steps-back.

[pavon]

I spent a fair bit of time trying to move to the podman ecosystem and rootless containers before deciding it wasn't ready for production in RHEL 8. I was used to RHEL being more, well, stable and wasn't expecting them to be pushing premature software (that is Fedora's job), so I was disappointed at the state. I would probably have been more upset if RedHat's misleading marketing had convinced higher-ups like the CTO, and I had to push back against directions from above, but investigating it and rejecting it was solely my decision so it wasn't a big deal.