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Comment by rsyring | Hacker News Reader

As long as they refuse to support installing on Ubuntu (and other popular distros), without relying on the distro repos which are always out of date, they will continue to lose to Docker.

Any serious project in this space supports as many distros as possible.

It's OSS, so I'm not complaining per se, I have no right to. They owe me nothing.

But this one issue has kept me from seriously considering Podman for years. They don't care about my use case and I therefore don't care to use their project.

When getting the latest version looks like this[1], who is really going to consider this for serious production uses?

1: https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/discussions...

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Entirely different perspective: If I have to add a separate repo, then this is a red flag.

> Any serious project in this space supports as many distros as possible.

Wrong way around. Any serious product is supported by lots of distros. Distros curate their selection and if nobody bothered packaging your stuff, then your stuff is not good enough.

To be clear, it doesn't explicitly not support Ubuntu or anything, it just doesn't privilege it. Podman doesn't produce packages for any distros.

Agreed. But, IMO, it looks like amateur hour when you compare their stance to the distro support Docker provides.

A slightly different perspective: Podman is made by the distro people (RedHat/Fedora). And they consider it unacceptable to mess with the software distribution channels of a distro. If Debian does not want latest Podman, they are not going to push the latest version to Debian users behind Debian repo's "back". This is a distro-to-distro respect rather than amateur hour.

I do not think this perspective is correct. You are considering official distro repos as a means to control what is allowed to be run on Debian. This is a kind of control commercial platforms often value because they use it to extract rent or to micromanage their experience that they sell to the rubes.

Debian DOES care about about both experience and ethics of what is allowed to be distributed in official repos but it is contrary to the ethos of free software to care what you run on your machine or by extension what others choose to offer. You are intuiting a corporate sort of perspective where neither it nor the raison d'être for it exists.

> You are considering official distro repos as a means to control what is allowed to be run on Debian.

I am rather considering official repos as a means to keeping your Debian system in a "supported" state. Many users, including software developers, want to only install software (or sw versions) that would not put their system in an unsupported configuration.

> Debian DOES care about about both experience and ethics of what is allowed to be distributed in official repos

Podman is widely distributed in official Debian repos, so ethics is not a question in this particular case. We are only talking about Debian repos being conservative with the versions of the software in the repos - not limited to Podman. Debian does not encourage users to install software from 3rd-party repos just to get a newer version of an existing package because the stability of the system (and the ability to do major version upgrades) cannot be guaranteed otherwise.

> As long as they refuse to support installing on Ubuntu (and other popular distros), without relying on the distro repos which are always out of date, they will continue to lose to Docker.

Your needs are incomprehensible to me: that is exactly why I use podman: a predictable version of it is in my distro's repos.

I go to docker.com and how do I even install the thing? What's "docker sandboxes"?

Get the latest version of docker? Why would I want the latest version? I don't want the latest version, I want the same version as my other machines have, so things work everywhere. And I usually don't know what version that is. But I sure do know what Debian version my other machines run!

Again, your needs are utterly incomprehensible to me.

I run Ubuntu 24.04 on my laptop and servers. The Podman version is 4.9.3.

It may be incompressible to you, but I'm not alone in thinking it's a problem:

https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/issues/2707...

I'm sorry this is happening to you. I'm on the team that helped bring podman into the CNCF and I worked on ubuntu for over a decade, this isn't a technical problem this is a business one.

Podman is in universe, so Canonical doesn't care unless you pay. Fair enough, good engineers cost money. RH isn't going to pay.

Podman engineers would love to be in Ubuntu, the Red Hat engineers would love to directly upload into Universe. Everything in this thread makes sense, it's a matter of who wants to pay for it. End users have been asking for this for years.

The engineers don't make the decisions. Canonical doesn't want to pay, Red Hat doesn't want to pay. Users stuck in the middle.

I get podman from brew even on Linux because the idea that vendors fighting over uploading tarballs to a server is stupid. Fuck distros.

I'm confused, the latest LTS version of Ubuntu is 26.04 (released on 2026/04/23) and has Podman v5.7.0 (released on 2025/11/11). [1]

If they're on a 24.04 LTS release is there any reason they would be on a newer version of Podman (without jumping through hoops)? Ubuntu 24.04LTS released on 2024/04/25 and the Debian Import Freeze was on 2024/02/29.

The bleeding edge Podman release at that time was a pre-release v5.0.0-RC3 (2024/02/22) and the latest actual release was v4.9.3 (2024/02/13). That's the version Ubuntu 24.04LTS has. [2][3][4]

So aren't they on the exact version of Podman they're supposed to be on for the operating system version they're running?

[1] https://packages.ubuntu.com/resolute/podman

[2] https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/podman

[3] https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/24.04/schedul...

[4] https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/releases?pa...

> 5.7.0+ds2-3build1

No thanks I'll get it from podman.

What's wrong with 5.7.0+ds2-3build1 ?

Ubuntu loves to mess with upstream by shipping a bunch of vendor patches. It's one of the main reasons I run Fedora, they do this the least in my experience

Every distro does this. That's what a distro is.

I don't claim to understand the business or politics between RedHat and Ubuntu.

I do know many projects with way less resources seem to be able to support Ubuntu and other popular distros just fine. Often through PPAs or their own apt repos (like Docker, PostgreSQL, or Incus).

If RedHat doesn't choose to, so be it. But IMO, they can't really compete with Docker when getting a recent release on the most popular distros is such a major cluster F.

If I manage an open source program like this, my job is to write the code and docs, publish it somewhere and maybe make some changes to make it more portable. That's it!

It's the distro's job to package and integrate this software with the rest of the system, to make it easier for their users.

I have 1677 packages installed. I absolutely _do not_ want to go to 1677 places to install or look for the latest version.

> If RedHat doesn't choose to

You still don't get it: Canonical didn't choose to include a newer version in their 24.04 release.

24.04 is a stable release. Package updates in stable releases need to follow the Stable Release Update process https://ubuntu.com/project/docs/SRU/stable-release-updates/ In essence someone needs to do contribute time and effort to make it happen. Canonical is free to choose the packages they want to maintain themselves and which ones go to universe and are community maintained. The upstream, if they care enough, can choose to get involved and try to do the updates. The process isn't exactly easy or fun. There's a bunch of requirements regarding backward compatibility and testing that need to be met. Snapd upstream goes though it for almost every release and it takes anything from a couple of weeks to a month. I don't think anything is stopping either party from updating the packages, although I don't why upstream wouldn't be interested in getting involved making this happen.

Thank you for the explanation!

That's on Ubuntu, and on you choosing to run an old version of Ubuntu, nothing to do with podman.

You're not alone in thinking it, but the other people are just similarly confused. The last reply to that thread explains the situation well[0].

[0]: https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/issues/2707...

I think you are taking an overly simplistic and dismissive view.

There's no confusion. I understand Podman's position. I'm simply saying that position keeps them from gaining enough users to really compete with Docker.

I run LTS Ubuntu versions for core stability. That usually doesn't keep me from getting the latest version of software that it makes sense to keep updated. Case in point...Docker!

So, on my "old" version of Ubuntu, which I agree is completely "on me" for choosing it, I'm able to easily run the latest version of Docker. They care about my use case, make my life as a sysadmin easier, so I use their software.

Podman doesn't and I therefore have avoided using their software for years even though they have some compelling features.

If you use an LTS version of Ubuntu (or Red Hat etc.), you are going to have older versions of software. That's just how it works. And is kind of the point of LTS. If you want more recent versions, use a rolling release or a more recent (non-LTS) version of Ubuntu (or whatever). The latest version of podman is going to depend on recent versions of the kernel and systemd, etc. and isn't going to work well on an older distro with older versions of those dependencies.

It's interesting that Linux users have been conditioned to expect this level of coupling when any other user would find that absurd. Do Windows 10 users expect to be stuck on software from 2015? Should one have to switch to Windows Insiders just to run recent games?

It's just a choice of stability https://vanillaos.org/blog/article/2023-01-31/point-vs-rolli...

There's a perfectly legit reason for wanting a stable, non-rolling, OS while keeping some software updated beyond versions the OS provides.

Lots of other software providers seem to care about being compatible with LTS releases of popular distros, like...Docker! They seem to manage supporting the older kernel and systemd versions just fine.

And, my entire argument here, is that this difference between Podman and Docker is glaring and one of the reasons Podman isn't more popular.

And that issue shows the problem with OSS.

Nothing is ever good enough.

> Please report this to your distribution

And the reply:

> but you could create your own .deb packages for each github release, which can be installed much quicker than downloading and compiling source code and all its dependencies.

This is why OSS maintainers have burn out. Always wanting more and more. Not even the source code is good enough.

My point is that it's not good enough to compete in this space.

Look at the distros that Docker supports. That kind of support is what users expect. When Podman just leaves it up to the distros to support, it's understandable. But, yes, it's not enough.

> That kind of support is what users expect.

Then they should also expect enshittification and rug-pulls when it's realised where motivation for that support comes from.

That's a you problem. Either use a rolling distro like Gentoo or Arch or learn to install software from source code yourself (it's not hard).

We both disagree with rsyring but I disagree with you even more! :D

Installing from source code is hard! There's always some broken dependencies and these days I just cba.

I'd sooner go complain on the internet than install a thing from the source code!

And only one of those solves the problem.

that's a really bad stance... nothing wrong with compiling from source

See my comment at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48785731

You're running an LTS release first released in 2024. What exactly did you expect was going to happen?

See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48785731

a.k.a. the most recent stable LTS, which will be succeeded by 26.04.1. Unless your hardware doesn't work on 24.04.4, I would not upgrade to 26.04 yet, unless you enjoy unexpected behavior in the console.

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