[zenmac]

For mac, wouldn't it be just easier to use lima from cli? How does Podman compare to that? Docker unless on Linux has always being a bloat.

Or are there any lightweight hypervisor on top of firecracker alternative? At this point with the way systemd is going, we should just switch back to VM? Everything is just more mature on native OS install. Docker to Linux, just feels kinda like SPA reinventing the html parsing on top of a rendering engine.

[jalk]

Havn't tried Colima, but podman is very simple to use and smells like docker cli.

On Apple Silicon machines however, latest podman version uses VM images which Rosetta doesn't work with, and hence it will use qemu for running amd64 containers. You can fix this by either installing podman 5.5 or create the VM from and older image [1]. My only complaint here is that the stock machine images are pretty large (~1G )

If you use containers to run tools that create files in your host (i.e. build tools), then you can use your host username as the default in the VM (machine init --username $(id -un)), and then run containers with --userns=keep-id. That way the the container command starts with the same username and uid as you host user - this is pretty tricky to get working with docker, from my experience.

We use Bazel as our build tool and we create a lot of images based on shared layers. Bazel produces oci layout directories that contain descriptors and symlinks to the actual layer tars. Podman can start a container "directly" from these directories[2], which speeds up image testing considerably, since it can detect known layers immediately. With docker you have to stream a tarball with all the layers and descriptors to the docker daemon, only for it to discover that it already knows most of the layers.

[1] https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-machine-ini... - machine images https://quay.io/repository/podman/machine-os

[2] podman run oci://<path to oci-layout-dir>

[fruitplants]

I used colima cli on M1-M2 Mac. A few memory related settings were required as some of old apps were huge. But apart from that it worked great. Nothing bad podman, just preferred colima.

[wink]

I tried colima once and couldn't get it to do what I wanted. Maybe just a missing shim, maybe our setup with docker-compose for integration tests. (I'm usually on linux, so maybe my lack of mac experience also played a role)

Zero problems with Podman Desktop.

[seemaze]

Brew install podman? CLI only, no lima/colima or gui required.