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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited to see this finally happen—acknowledgement that Docker Desktop has been an essential part of the process of onboarding devs (who often use the command line, but sparingly) into containerized development with a gentle on-ramp.

The big question is whether Podman Desktop will be (a) stable and not a memory-hog, (b) make container workflows on Mac/Windows as simple (conceptually at least) as on Linux, and (c) be a sustainable effort for the community that's still extremely Red Hat-centric.

To that last point, I still see very little adoption outside of the Red Hat ecosystem. It seems like `docker-ce` is still installed on most servers, `docker-compose` for lightweight app orchestration, and when people use Kubernetes, few people know or care what underlying container management daemon is running.

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I can write docker-compose file, run it on my laptop. Can't do that without spending 2 days of pre study with K8s. And to have it ready on a basic laptop is not fun. At all

But K8s is maybe not the tool for that either.

Rancher Desktop has been pretty seamless for me for local k8s development. Not too much different than a docker-compose.

I can do it. It's still overly complex for my need (local development with a db, some services...). I don't need the complexity of k8s for that.

In fact, I don't need a big complex solution for most of my deployment. Container are not only to be deployed in the Cloud, or on a Cloud like infra. They're convenient to create and isolate some service on one (yes 1) server without having to fight to install the dependencies. docker-compose up and my blog is up, some random website, a logger based on kibana or whatever.

So yup, I don't care about k8s. I'll care about it when the need arise, knowing full well that there's cost and benefit to it. But not for my current low need.

That’s the disconnect I also experience. Working with multiple different organizations they either .

1. Use Docker Compose and have no container strategy

2. Have a container team and an orchestration platform.

Not many organizations operate in the middle ground, seems difficult to do well with little overhead.

I work on an operations team of about 2.5 people who handle everything for a small SaaS company and we're slowly containerizing. New systems are built and deployed in Docker and the legacy stuff is slowly getting there. We're using Swarm which I'm thinking is probably more like the middle ground.

Docker Swarm was the dream. A shame so many were dissuaded from using it due to the potential for support to be yanked out from underneath them.

If you use compose, you really should avoid podman, its full of unsupported edge cases and other issues.

That's why I don't bother with it on servers, I always use docker-ce with compose.

I've tried to make podman work so many times but one of my biggest issues is the lack of great documentation and support from third parties (that's okay!). I just have a hard time finding good examples well explained to gain anything out of it.

I do think my issues are coming from not fully understanding rootless/rootful stuff combined with SELinux doing its thing as well.

I like docker compose to deploy stuff.

I do use podman+distrobox (Steam Deck & Fedora Kinoite)

It looks like I can finally see my distrobox containers with podman desktop. The first time I installed it months ago I could see them.

On macOS it is likely to remain a memory hog for the time being due to a bug in Hypervisor.framework: https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1645645284721184768

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