Fully qualified is indeed the way to go. Unfortunately a lot of tutorials manifests and other materials have short names, and changing the default registry just opens up a load of typo squatting attacks.

That's a very good argument, but people have down used to dropping the domain prefix because it's always been optional.

Giving people the option to configure a default repository via the daemon.json would alleviate that issue, but I'm not sure if that's really enough to fork.

That said, they also maintain a list of aliases for a bunch of container images. https://github.com/containers/shortnames . My distro's podman package then drops in that file into /etc/containers/registries.conf.d/ via one of the package's dependencies.

I agree it's the better proposal, but it does slightly break the "drop-in"-ness of Podman.