[kobalsky]

podman rootless and startup speed was what lured me in, sadly after a couple of years I've switched back to docker, bit happily in rootless mode now too.

podman works fine until it doesn't. My hypothesis is that it has some fundamental design philosophy that makes it brittle. Properly cleaning up doesn't exist in their vocabulary.

For example, a cancelled download or image extraction can bring the whole thing down at the worst time, you have to hunt down the corrupted folder and remove so that anything works again.

A failed compose startup can leave the network in a undefined state hard to diagnose and impossible to recover without wiping some folders within /run/user and killing some rogue processes manually.

This is further cemented by the fact that a lot of minor issues are answered with: podman system reset, which reeks of rm -fr node_modules.

docker was always a pleasure to work with, I still don't understand why I suffered with podman so long.

[pikelet]

That's pretty much my experience! I've tried switching to podman a few times now and I really wanted to like it. Each time lasting a few months, and it always ends with frustration. At this point it's like btrfs for me. Perhaps it has improved, but I've been burned too many times, the trust is gone and I just will not go back. Some software just seems to have fundamental design issues (too fast, too early?), and when that's the case, more often than not it doesn't matter how many years of development go into it, it will always have problems.

Docker isn't perfect. I wish they would put more development into rootless mode. But it has never given me the kind of issues podman has. It just does what I ask it to and gets out of the way.