[goku12]

> the differentiating feature between lxd and podman seems to be that lxd can manage full virtual machines

LXD is a management layer over LXC and Qemu(KVM?). LXC is all about system containers. The Qemu support is a recent addition [1]. LXD supported only LXC system containers until then.

> Containers you run with docker and podman are fully capable of running multiple processes

Yes. I have done this. But it was very unwieldy - probably because docker, podman etc weren't designed to run system containers.

[1] https://ubuntu.com/blog/lxd-virtual-machines-an-overview

[btreecat]

I think the point is "system container" is a marketing term, not a technical term.