[alisonatwork]

I use Podman on Windows. Docker on Windows has been an endless stream of annoyances and frustration for me, starting from the fact everything points you to install an aggressively user-unfriendly GUI that starts up heavyweight processes on boot, nags you to sign up for a cloud account for some reason, and then nags you again that you shouldn't be using this so-called open source product for work anyway. Installing "just the command line" docker as an unsupported alternative is unnecessarily complicated, and last time I tried most WSL VMs didn't even support it out of the box anyway.

Enter Podman, you just winget install podman and it gets out of your way. When you need to run a container, you start up the Podman VM. When you don't, your system behaves exactly as it always did before. If you need to run something in a compose file, podman-compose is there. Maybe it can't handle esoteric configs, but it's worked for my use cases. The only thing Podman doesn't do is integrate with VS Code properly, but honestly the struggle of getting Docker to behave itself on Windows is far more annoying to me than missing some keyboard shortcuts in VS Code, so for me it's not a problem.

I would (and do) recommend Podman as the default solution for containers on Windows. The only reason I can see to use Docker is if your company is paying for it, or if you have a complicated compose setup, in which case it might be worth moving to Kubernetes anyway.