[freedomben]

I love podman and use it extensively, but am less sure how useful the machine functionality will be (to me). I use KVM (with virt-manager) extensively, and I could see how treating VMs as ephemeral like containers might be nice for some workflows, but for me I want my VMs to be stateful as they are now. Anything I want container workflow for I just use containers. I don't do any Windows though, all linux.

I might actually find machines useful for testing some old wordpress instances that I'd love to be able to iterate on with a full systemd and everything on the same machine (because that mirrors how prod is set up). I might dig into this use case a little deeper.

What are some things people would use this for?

[jchw]

I believe this is primarily for running Podman on macOS and Windows, where you need to run everything through a VM for anything to really work.

[apitman]

One area this is desirable is AI agents. Often you just need to spin them up for quick ephemeral tasks, but you want more isolation than containers give you. I'm still looking for a good solution here. A cool one I've been playing with recently is https://smolmachines.com/

[mgrandl]

I can recommend microsandbox. More mature than smolmachines. I have tried both.

https://github.com/superradcompany/microsandbox

[apitman]

I actually just found microsandbox this morning and it looks really solid. One thing it's lacking is GPU support. With smolmachines you can use Vulkan through virtio-gpu/Venus which is quite nice. Can you give more details on what you prefer about microsandbox?