It's supposed to be a drop-in replacement for docker - IE, you can literally alias docker to podman. I did that for a while, but ran into some command line options that weren't supported.
I see they've added some k8s integration, but not sure how you see it being a k8s alternative? Maybe a minikube alternative...
it misses some features docker has and docker misses some features podman has and some subtle behaviour differences can lead unexpected outcomes (mostly in favor of podman doing things better)
many of the differences are irrelevant but can be an issue in scripts calling docker/podman cli
one of the more surprising discrepancies we ran into was that due to the rootless podman nature you don't need to "slowly copy the context to the daemon". In our case this lead to some slightly sub-optimal setups running just fine with podman but then taking way to long to run with docker as it copied a ton of data.
generally in my experience if you only use podman or only use docker and the "drop-in" aspect only matters for switching from one to the other permanently it works grate, but if you idk. want to use docker on some systems and podman on others it might not be the best idea
I see they've added some k8s integration, but not sure how you see it being a k8s alternative? Maybe a minikube alternative...