Speaking to Mac usage specifically here.

I’ve used all three and went with Colima + Goland/Pycharm’s docker integration for the UI. Easy to install, integrations tend to just work without fiddling.

Podman is honestly overrated. Getting it integrated with other tooling is a pain and no it’s not as simple as renaming podman to docker. K8S side works pretty ok. I didn’t like podman desktop.

Docker Engine requires docker desktop on Mac so if you’re using one you’re using the other.

I’ve had a weird bug with podman machine that moved me towards Colima: the vm will just randomly freeze and not come back to life until you restart it. Also podman machine doesn’t use the virtualization framework on MacOS, preventing the usage of virtiofs, which means volume mounts are super slow.