I used Arch Linux and followed their docs[1], mainly because I wanted it to also run without root. Big mistake. Attempting to run a simple postgres database w/ and w/o root permissions for Podman resulted in my system getting into an inconsistent state. I was unable to relaunch the container due to the state of my system.
I mucked around with runc/crun and I ended up literally nuking both the root and non-root directories that stored them on my computer. I reset my computer back to Podman for root only, hoping that I had just chosen a niche path. It still would leave my system broken, requiring drastic measures to recover. No thanks.
After much debugging, finally switching back to Docker, I realized my mistake: I had forgotten a required environment variable. Silly mistake.
Docker surfaced the problem immediately. Podman did not.
Docker recovered gracefully from the error. Podman left my system in an inconsistent state, unable to relaunch the container and unable to remove it
Again, I'm not sure how much of my experience was just trying to force Podman into a square hole? I'm sure there are other people that make it work just fine for their use cases
Edit: I should note that I used it as a docker-compose replacement, which is probably another off-the-beaten path usage that made this more dramatic than it should have been