[bandrami]

There's a bit of a Turing Tarpit here because they're both ultimately just namespaces under the hood so you can with effort get them to do equivalent things.

The original idea behind LXD was to build packages in a system equivalent to your real system but without spamming your dpkg database and filesystem with all the required -dev files. The idea behind Docker (which podman is a better implementation of and extension to) was to be able to have three different versions of Apache ephemerally on your system to match the versions used by three different projects today.

Ultimately you can do both with either (and I generally use podman to build packages, as an example) but if you do that you aren't playing to the project's strengths.

Toolbox and distrobox are sort of middle grounds that do both of them well enough to be tolerable.