From Compose to Systemd: Elegantly Managing Containers with Podman and Quadlet

I’ve tried to use Podman in a “normie” homelab - Macs and Linux - and my experience is that it’s simple until it isn’t, and the layers of abstraction and documentation make it difficult to reason about what’s wrong. I found myself combing through Redhat forums, for an issue on a Mac, and it was unclear which components were relevant for my deployment.

I never did solve it, and ended up buying OrbStack.

I guess that a mac requires a linux vm, because quadlets rest on systemd.

But Macs and Windows boxes will always be a lesser experience for dev workloads, that was even during the days when the LAMP stack reigned supreme.

Also note that in the end Quadlet spits out systemd unit definitions to run containers, which can pretty easily be turned into OpenRC scripts if you happen to run distros like Gentoo or Alpine.

Explains how to automatically convert a docker-compose.yaml to a pod+quadlet definition.