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Comment by matai_kolila | Hacker News Reader

Am I just a dum dum for not getting this to drop-in replace Docker Desktop for my relatively simple projects? Has anyone else experienced the problematic practicalities of switching, or should I just spend a bit more time with it?

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I'm pretty sure the main reason there's a push to move from Docker Desktop now is because earlier this year they started charging larger businesses/teams to use it.

So if you're just using it for yourself you probably don't need to bother

https://www.docker.com/blog/updating-product-subscriptions/

Oh I'm aware of that, my point is that it isn't the smooth transition folks seem to make it out to be (unless, of course, I'm a dum dum which is possible).

I tried it in debian/ubuntu and it didn't work at all, but I got the vibe the tool was maintained by non-debian using individuals.

For me the main reason to use Podman over Docker is rootless containers. Another one is also that Docker is really not pleasant to install on Linux.

> Another one is also that Docker is really not pleasant to install on Linux.

I'm curious on which Linux did you encounter issues while installing Docker? I cannot comment on the (to me somewhat pointless) Docker Desktop GUI installation on Linux, but I can confidently report that installing and using docker engine on Ubuntu, at least, is quite trivial and clearly documented[0] on the website.

[0] https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/debian/

First of: It has been some time since I last installed Docker. It actually was on Ubuntu and a properly current version was not in the distro repositories, so I had to add a new repository and it installed plenty of extra dependencies. It's not hard, but also not really pleasant.

It also seems like Docker is now able to run rootless as well, so my nitpicks are actually more minor than I originally thought. It's still not daemonless, but it would work for my use case still I think.

Not them, but my employer makes it a major PITA to add non-standard repositories on the corporate Ubuntu image because of the weird and non-standard way Apt is configured. The "docker.io" package available in the official Ubuntu repository is typically horribly out of date.

Additionally, (and admittedly this isn't really Docker's fault), the default IP range for Docker's network happens to conflict with my employer's internal network, which is great fun to debug if you forget to change it.

All LTS versions are using 20.10.12. That's less than one year old. I don't see how horribly out of date this is.

I should have been more specific: It's been a few months (maybe even a year?) since I last checked, but that package used to not include buildx which I need, that's what I meant by out of date.

I experienced issues on Fedora because back then Docker did not support cgroups v2.

And pods and not needing a daemon to run them among other things. Docker is still easier precisely because it has a daemon that automatically just starts up your countainers thay you've configured to run at startup, without the need to create systemd unit files.

It's not pleasant? I don't know what Docker Desktop is (or what the point is) but Docker Server is two lines of shell on most distros (add repo and install).

I use CentOS, Ubuntu and Arch and have to regularly use third-party repos, PPAs or the AUR - this isn't a particularly uncommon thing to do when installing software. And it beats running a shell script, which is how k8s stuff works most of the time :P

Weird, I have no need I can see for rootless and on multiple machines no issues installing Docker on Ubuntu including using either the Ubuntu repo or the Docker repo. It just works.

Besides the licensing issues, I found it bloated and flaky. For me, the friendly GUI just added pain. I use docker in Hyper-V as my home media server instead. WSL2 also works.

They can run side by side and Podman Desktop is also able to show you all Docker containers, images, etc.

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