Podman Desktop 1.11: Light mode, Kubernetes features, macOS improvements | Hacker News Reader

Podman Desktop 1.11: Light mode, Kubernetes features, macOS improvements

podman-desktop.io

108 pointstwelvenmonkeys52 comments

I'm remarkably impressed with Podman Desktop. I rarely use GUI tools as they rarely offer me more than what a CLI can, but Podman Desktop is becoming a sort of system dashboard or cockpit for me. It's getting quite feature rich. The k8s support is unexpected but appreciated, though I do wish it had better support for multiple kube config files. On the CLI I use aliases (sometimes env vars) to specify the kube config file, but in Podman desktop for some reason it won't use the env vars that it's supposed to. I built it such that there is no default cluster. It requires explicit specifying of the cluster. I did this intentionally so that commands never accidentally run against prod. With Podman Desktop, I can hack around the bug by symlinking ~/.kube/config to the one I want, but then my explicit specifying is gone and it's possible to accidentally be connected to prod when I think it's staging. My biggest feature request for Podman Desktop: support for multiple kube configs and let me label them with environment so it's immediately clear which env I'm talking to.

Used to be that people would wait ages for applications to get a "Dark mode", I find it funny how now we have to wait for "light mode" instead.

Even so, good to see that arriving. I've been experimenting recently and I've found podman very useful compared to my previous experiences trying to do containery stuff. ( Admittedly a very long time ago now which burned me and put me off trying again for a long time. )

Like wayland, podman was one of those things that took a lot of "I'll give it another shot? Nope, not ready" before I could switch.

Lately the only real incompatibility I run in to with podman is that the handling of `RUN --mount=type=secret` in a Containerfile/Dockerfile is a bit broken (https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/5282).

Lol, I could not even guess that the "light mode" was the opposite of dark theme, not the term for being a "light" as opposed to "heavy". So I was so surprised to see only the description "that light mode is available now, and you can turn it on". What is light mode? Not a "mode", it is a "theme".

The CLI is the "light mode".

Pretty much every program I interact with on Linux simply respects the system theme. I don't understand why light or dark "mode" for individual programs is even a thing.

Podman Destop is surprisingly bad on MacOS. It has a kind of proxy-like/userspace network driver. That means your tcp connection shown in a host system through `netstat`. ICPM is not implemented and always returns success. Try running `ping 66.0.0.0` or any other non-existing IP from the container and see. At that moment I'll continue using, well, podman in a Linux VM running UTM.

If you haven’t tried it yet, I can recommend OrbStack[1] for container things on macOS. I don’t use it for anything more than spinning up dev DBs locally, but I know it supports Kubernetes in some form or another.

[1] https://orbstack.dev

I never used podman desktop but I LOVE OrbStack.

Compared to docker desktop it's night and day, it is so much more performant and I never had an issue with it, totally recommend.

https://docs.orbstack.dev/faq#open-source

Into the trash it goes.

Along with the OS it runs on? Or is it just App developers that you don't allow to make money?

How pure does someone need to be before you leave them alone?

There's an obvious answer if they want an open source container experience that works great (at least the container part, not the desktop part): run it on Linux. To slam a Mac only product that by most accounts runs well, and quite a bit better than its competitors, just because it's not Open Source is disgusting.

I wish I had as few problems in my life as you because I would never consider saying "I'm not using this because it's not open source" to be "slamming" or "disgusting".

The quote was to be exact: "Into the trash it goes". A cheap dismissal for arguably nonsensical reasons given that it's closed software specifically for a closed OS.

And let me add that this kind of attitude towards hard to make, well written desktop software makes me think people like you and the OP deserve every single one of the online-only Electron monstrosities on your desktop.

With a number of open-core projects pulling the rug from under us recently: Terraform, Akka, etc. I'm with the parent - there's no way I'm building on a shaky foundation if you're just going to fuck me over.

And yes, I understand this is their choice, they need to make money, etc. But the real issue here is they're presenting their stuff as suitable to build your company on, then once you're reliant on them they start charging (big) money.

Just start out charging money and make it good enough to justify that, enough with the bait and switch.

Apple has an upfront revenue model, and I'm happy to pay for that (when I do). So does Datadog, so does Amazon. But don't pretend to live in the OSS world then want to also be a SaaS when you've achieved escape velocity. They're "succeeding" by destroying the relationship with the people that gave them that success.

> they're presenting their stuff as suitable to build your company on, then once you're reliant on them they start charging (big) money.

Where is Orbstack doing any of that? The product has always been closed-source and requires a paid license for commercial use.

> But don't pretend to live in the OSS world then want to also be a SaaS when you've achieved escape velocity

Ditto here, Orbstack isn't "pretending to live in the OSS world", nor is it a SaaS. Why are you making these claims?

Where did I say they shouldn’t make money?

Are you not concerned about the closed-source OS that this closed-source app is running on?

One step at a time.

This is neither 4chan nor Reddit, if you don’t have anything to add to the conversation other than cheap quips, this is not the place for you to post.

I agree I would prefer if OrbStack were open source, but there’s a place and value in high quality closed source apps within the ecosystem. They do also open-source parts of the application, which is more than a lot of closed source developers do. If nothing else, maybe someone can find a way to utilize the advancements that OrbStack provides and can make an open source alternative.

I'm a very happy, paying OrbStack user. The UI is much more responsive that Docker Desktop. It also has a very unique debug shell [0] feature that allows you access to common tools even in minimal images.

[0]: https://docs.orbstack.dev/features/debug

I've edited the title to add more information on macOS. With this release we now implement Podman 5.1.0 which includes a MASSIVE speedup for AMD64 builds / running containers as well as improvements to the podman networking stack.

I would go so far at saying that Podman Desktop for macOS is non-functional. My understanding is that Podman Desktop will spin up some sort of Linux VM to do all the actual containerization, and the network/proxy is just a mess. For all I know Docker Desktop does the same, but if it does it's better at hiding it.

Docker Desktop also works perfectly well with AMD64 emulation and/or Rosetta.

Linux containers require a Linux kernel. Any tool on a MAC that is running containers locally is doing it in a VM.

For basic dev container stuff, I switched to podman and I'll not go back to Docker. It works great and it being daemonless is just a cherry on top.

Same. I have both limactl and podman setup but I think I’ll go all in on podman. On the Mac I was impressed how awesome podman is. Docker could have had this position but they need to make money and changed the license. More power to them. But the consequences are that I’ve moved.

I want to love it, but it's surprisingly difficult to set up a recent version on Debian / Ubuntu. As far as I can tell, even the latest stable Debian / Ubuntu have Podman 3.x in their apt package repositories, which is missing a bunch of features (latest is 5.x).

It's 4.9.3 for Ubuntu 24.04. Close enough, but it won't be updated in the forseeable future, so the gap will grow.

There are https://build.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:kubic:libconta... repos, but it's what it says on the tin: unstable. And its usage is discouraged from the upstream bug reporting point of view. Works fine to keep up with development, but I wouldn't use that for user-facing workloads.

If you are on macOS, give OrbStack a shot. It works surprisingly well and fast.

+1. Love OrbStack. It’s embarrassing how bad docker is by comparison.

If your company is paying for docker desktop, stop right now and switch to OrbStack.

I'll give it a shot - how useful are the Pro features?

I subscribed, but only to be license-compliant. I've never used a pro feature, though I've looked at things like the debug mode. Honestly I just use the same set of command line tools I'd use with the official Docker client.

Does it keep things contained?

Does it mess up or clutter the system?

Currently I am using a Fusion VM to have something similar to WSL2 on Mac. Is this a better solution?

I'm a fan of Rancher Desktop -- it has everything integrated and working out of the box, it can even provide the CLI tools like docker, kubectl or helm for you.

On the other hand, in Podman Desktop, you can't even use an image from Podman Desktop docker in Podman Desktop kubernetes without extra steps. I'd recommend it only if you want Podman specifically. If you just want to run docker and/or kubernetes, I'd go with Rancher Desktop.

If you want something more general purpose, Canonical Multipass has a good sample docker setup. Annoyingly, This is the only Canonical product I can recommend at this point.

I use it with MacOS. I assume WSL is a better choice for Windows laptops, and there’s no reason to add a VM to get docker on Linux.

https://multipass.run/docs/docker-how-to

I liked Multipass until I ran into storage corruption issues like many others [1][2] and broke all my VMs. On MacOS, Multipass uses qemu in which the apple-hvf support isn't getting much updates after 2021 [3].

[1]: https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/3455 [2]: https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/3235 [3]: https://github.com/qemu/qemu/commits/master/accel/hvf

Thanks for the heads up.

Re: quemu and apple hvf that’s really sad news.

The VM disk corruption problem has been affecting all open source Apple hvf hypervisors. lima with vfkit or UTM are most promising ones for now: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/issues/1957#issuecomment-182..., https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/pull/2026, https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/pull/5919

The Rancher Desktop VM with k8s enabled has about 10% continuous cpu usage at idle on my 2019 MBP. I really wish there was something I could do to reduce that.

That is almost certainly the etcd binaries on the vm chatting to itself. I would expect k3s should have lower CPU usage as they (by default) jettison etcd for an embedded db

Having said that, aside from the general WTF of something burning CPU, does in impact you in some way? Battery drain, sluggish apps, memory hog (I'd bet on that one), other?

The deck of the MBP is definitely warmer with RD idling in the background. Does it practically impact anything I'm working on? No. Does it tickle the OCD related neurons in my brain? Yes and I hate that.

I just turn it on and off as needed instead of leaving it running all the time.

Has someone ever tried both Rancher Desktop and OrbStack on macOS?

I love OrbStack but I never heard of Rancher Desktop before, maybe I should try it

Yes! Maybe I’m always expecting the wrong thing with Podman Desktop, but I can’t ever get it to work the way I expect it to - on Windows or Mac.

Rancher Desktop, however, has been a breeze. Same with using Lima.[0]

With Lima:

  limactrl create template://docker

[0] https://lima-vm.io/

There's also Colima, which allows you to run "colima start --kubernetes" to set up everything with Lima. However it needs some additional setup with the CLI tooling, so I rather recommend Rancher Desktop.

...and on Linux running the actual docker daemon, of course.

Initial experience on random (fresh-ish install) Windows laptop: Bad. Creates VM, and then can't find it. Now I can install Hyper-V management tools to get rid of it...

Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Command execution failed with exit code 125 Error: vm "podman-machine-default" already exists on hypervisor

With all of these great improvements in recent months i'd love to see an updated roadmap... https://github.com/containers/podman-desktop/wiki/Roadmap

Anyone know if there’s a way to get access to devices in a container on MacOS yet? (Eg USB webcam, MPS or CUDA accelerator)

I think Tart or one of the other more VM-like emulators was working on USB support at least; it's not a simple problem to solve, and I'm still not to the point I was with VirtualBox on Intel Macs in terms of being able to emulate any situation easily.

Look for krunkit for GPU/Cuda Accelerator. Should be much better support in podman 5.2 out next month, I believe.

You can use it now if you grab it from brew.

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