Podman has three main advantages over docker: Not needing to run as root, not requiring a daemon in the background and being packaged directly by linux distros.
(Granted Docker is only in Ubuntu's "universe" section and not as a supported package that would receive security patches etc)
2. I like the idea of not having a daemon but never actually had a problem with this in practice. The daemon has never crashed on me. systemd also has daemons that have also never crashed on me.
3. It's like 3 lines to install the official docker package. This is a non-issue for me.
Those do not sound like very meaningful advantages. Certainly not significant enough for me to want to switch from something that Just Works.
Thanks for the reply though. I'll be sticking with Docker.
If you don't understand why others are so excited about those tools, it simply means that you're not part of their tribe.
Podman has long running processes as well, there's a podman process that'll run once you've launched at least one containner, and a conmon for each container (equivalent to containerd-shim)
Packaged directly... it is by RH and SUSE, don't think by debian/ubuntu. At least for ubuntu, 20.04 packages Docker 19.03 just fine.
With rootless podman they use slirp4netns and all get the same IP, with rootful podman or Docker a bridge network is established so that containers that aren't in the same pod can communicate with each other.
Are there any downsides to podman that you know about?