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Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

Just recently set up Podman Desktop on Mac for work (on my old computer, I'd used Rancher Desktop on Windows).

Getting everything installed was a little bit annoying, since I use a nonstandard Homebrew prefix, and Homebrew doesn't currently provide a 'cask' for the pre-built Podman binaries. That means that `brew install --cask podman-desktop` requires building a bunch of things from source for me. But writing one wasn't hard, and the install process was good after that.

One issue I seem to have consistently though is that the VM `podman machine` uses hangs. I haven't investigated it, but I think it might hang every time my laptop sleeps, because it's most often hung when I come back to my computer in the mornings, and that seems so damn near every time.

Anyone else have this problem on macOS?

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like podman is by and for linux devs. Once you move to Mac or Windows, you give up podman's main benefit of running containers without a daemon since you're still having to run a VM.

It's for folks who deploy to Linux. In the most recent case, I just needed it to mirror some images from DockerHub to an Amazon ECR.

Not having a Linux box for a dev machine, I'd have to involve one somewhere, and it'd either be a local VM or a remote one.

In my case, the main benefit of running Podman is not versus Docker. I don't want to run Docker Desktop because of its licensing. Podman doesn't have to offer me a technological benefit that Docker doesn't, at least for development use cases.

For development use cases like devcontainers, I agree, though. For that kind of stuff on macOS, I use Nix instead of a VM-based solution like Podman Desktop or Docker for Mac or whatever.

I was hoping not to read your comment because thats the reason why i stoped playing around with podman.

The frustration of the background VM having some issues on my mac made me switch to paid docker again. I don't have the time to play around with something which i need for work and costs 10$ per month.

And i do prefer opensource

It looks like this might be the issue:

https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/334

I wouldn't think that qemu would be associated with a display in the required way here, but maybe being launched by a GUI app that's not a terminal emulator is somehow enough?

Related bug affecting Lima (blocked by this one): https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/issues/2

This is the first I'd heard of 'app nap'. I guess macOS does iOS things and actively freezes apps it thinks are idle.

Maybe it has to do this to get passable battery life during sleep, now that Macs don't actually sleep (S3) anymore?

My employer stopped paying for Docker Desktop licenses but I never really understood the appeal in the first place, we definitely faced some issues with our enterprise setup (proxy and registry mirrors, nothing out of the ordinary for a big company).

Colima works pretty well, and documenting a reproducible setup is easy.

If I were willing to spend my own money, I'd pick OrbStack.

Regularly - including at random times not related to sleep. It also randomly blows away mounts on the underlying VM from time to time which means recreating the machine and any images - and every time on qemu update. There have been some very rough edges on Mac for some time now.

podman on macOS has always been a huge pain in the ass for me, but I stick with it anyway.

My podman VM also hangs after putting my M2 Mac to sleep. It's not a big deal for me to restart it in the morning, but it's just about the 1,000th papercut/bug/inconsistency I've encountered.

looks like this issue: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/20639

I've attempted destroying my default podman-machine VM and recreating it as described in that issue, since I hadn't done that after upgrading to Podman 4.8 (incidentally, I am using the binaries from upstream, not a Homebrew build).

Maybe I'll remember to post back here about whether that works. :)

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