I tried using Podman for about 4 or 5 months on my M1 Mac, but eventually just gave up in frustration. I'm not doing anything too crazy, just running Minikube for some local development, but it just isn't stable enough and requires a lot of digging into threads to find the workarounds or the proper config.

I was wasting more and more time on it. It was constantly crashing/hanging so one day I just said fuck it and switched back to Docker Desktop, which not only worked better than when I switched but seems to have improved quite a lot in the intervening time as well.

I've been using orbstack on macos and its been wonderful. Much faster than docker for. Mac.

It works well, but I found I had to configure several items inside the VM to get it to work within our corporate environment. Timezones, ntpd, proxy, and arm64/amd64 cross platform all needed me to tweak some stuff. But that was quite a while ago and may be fixed now.

Colima on the other hand works pretty much seamlessly, but really works best on macOS Ventura because you can enable vz virtualization.

Edited to add: colima works seamlessly on the command line. So if you're command-line-averse, you'll need to learn some new commands and things won't be as convenient. I haven't tried rancher desktop yet.

> Anyone using Podman on a macOS? How's the experience compared to Docker Desktop?

Don't forget there is also Rancher Desktop[1]

[1] https://rancherdesktop.io

I wanted to try a while ago so I downloaded Podman Desktop, but I couldn't get past the initial setup due to issues in the desktop app. I was able to reproduce this on two or three Macs, can't recall exactly.

It has been a long-standing issue but seems as though it is on its way to resolution: https://github.com/containers/podman-desktop/issues/1633.

I am waiting for a few months to make sure it is all sorted and will try again to see if it works then.

There are some problems especially with the QEMU integration. E.g. two bugs that irritated me immensely:

* podman with --network host won't expose the ports.

* If you suspend the laptop the time on the VM goes haywire.

I always found docker to be unreasonably buggy too so am not sure how I feel about this.

Not podman but using rancher desktop and it has either nerdctl + containerd or docker and dockerd options and I have been using it a month without issue replacing docker desktop. The kubernetes options work well too

Just joined a team and received an M1 Pro laptop but licensed docker isn't in the budget... tl;dr a bit early to tell, but I think it works.

podman-desktop is pretty rough, but it gave me enough confidence to start using podman generally. podman-mac-helper solved a few docker compatibility problems I had in previous attempts in 2021 and 2022.

It seems like my problems getting started with podman just last week wete mainly due to the abundance of already outdated tutorials. Maybe those who are more active in this space can weigh-in, but fixes and common work arounds documented as recently as 6 months ago aren't necessary an longer? For me, podman works without nearly as much fuss as I remember.