Podman supports Docker images, Dockerfiles, and Docker-compatible CLI interfaces. Simply use alias docker=podman and you’ll never know the difference.
Unless you use Docker Swarm, in which case you'll lose access to simple orchestration that's not overengineered, unlike Kubernetes which you'll now be forced to use.
Or unless you use software that depends on the Docker socket being available (such as for Portainer, a graphical management utility [1]), in which case you'll lose the ability to use such software.
Or maybe you're one of the countless folks who tried using Podman but ran into a variety of issues that still haven't been addressed in many cases [2].
Or maybe you use Docker Compose and now have just lost the ability to run simple single node orchestration with YAML files, because Podman Compose is oftentimes flawed as well [3].
That's not to say that what Podman is attempting to do shouldn't be applauded, yet claiming that exchanging one set of leaky abstractions for another set of leaky abstractions is painless and will work for all of the people out there simply isn't true. I don't see Podman being a backwards compatible alternative to Docker on an API level, it'll simply kill it off eventually by supporting the OCI standard for containers and being a Kubernetes runtime at the lower level. Lots of people will need to re-engineer their approach to running containers and lots of time will be necessary to migrate away from Docker.
I think Docker is a fascinating enginnering story, an amazing tool to simplify and give life to groupc, which got released to the wild and sat while seeing competition offer decent alternatives that got adoption. They could have become the de facto container runtime implementation, perhaps swarm the de facto orchestrator, had they actually kept their distance ahead of every other competing alternatives. They could have charged almost all they want for enterprise licensing of a brilliant runtime and even more for the orchestrator. They failed. Seeing they hired 300+ employees and didn't maintain their pioneership is a testament of their incapability to run a business.
The hope for docker to survive is that the open source community forks and improves what's now called moby. As a business they missed the boat.
https://github.com/genuinetools/img
A few rootless feature may not work. But as root i haven't seen problems so far.
- Someone relying on Docker only features like Docker compose
> Support for multiple container image formats, including OCI and Docker images.