podman

I've used crun without root for a lot of practical use cases, if you are only doing limited use of the network and are careful with volume mounts it works pretty well. Podman also has a fully rootless mode which can work for many uses: https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/blob/main/d...

The '--userns=auto' argument is a useful isolation method in both rootless and rootful Podman containers. This allows rootful Podman to orchestrate privileged capabilities while running the container processes in an unprivileged namespace. See the discussion here: https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/discussions...

Yeah that's an unfortunate downside of the daemon-less design. Service management (like dependencies, health checks, etc) are outsourced to systemd since there's nothing locally available to monitor them. The fact that the documentation doesn't mention this is a major miss. For anyone curious, there's more details on why this is tricky to do with Podman at https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/pull/27033 .

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'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/p

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...

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...

They should better manage expectations. They put rootless as a forefront before it was ready and still no proper support for Ubuntu on v4 of Podman. [1] https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/discussions...

There were other problems although it’s been a few years so I’ve forgotten them. I think the container I had trouble with Ory Kratos. We did eventually get it to work but had to change the sample docker deployment a fair bit. macOS had a seperate set of problems. I ended up just going with buildx and Colima on macOS. (We don’t use Docker Desktop.) Long term I’d like to try to switch to podman again, but it needs to have a “be 100% compatible with Docker” mode as opposed to this: https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/issues/1478...

Would be great to know if I can uninstall docker on Mac and just install https://github.com/containers/podman/releases and be good to go with my docker compose files ?! I have the feeling the docker company is communicating a lot with Apple because virtualisation got better and better over the years. I wonder if podman would be a speed downgrade here?

For your Claude user running container, Rootless Podman is very easy to setup, it's all I use on Debian 13: https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/blob/main/d... Depending on what container you are running, sometimes you need to fiddle with passing volumes/devices/permissions/groups/capabilities to the container. If you are just running normal userspace programs then it's pretty seamless. Podman should support all the same arguments as Docker, and you can install `podman-docker` on Debian which creates an alias: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/podman-docker

Podman approach: https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/28238

The most common one I run into is with volumes, when the full path doesn't already exist. Docker will just make the path, Podman throws an error. It's been called a "bug" in docker but the fact is everyone just expects the paths to be created. I want it to just work, not make everyone in the industry redo their dockerfiles to be "correct." https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/6234 It looks like there was some work done to resolve this in 2023 and 2024 but I know this was still happening for me in mid 2025. Podman is technically correct here but functionally broken in a way that keeps pushing me away because I don't have time to deal with that :(

Here's an example of a bug that I filed about non-actionable error messages: https://github.com/karmab/kcli/issues/456 The first error message was "No usable public key found, which is required for the deployment" which doesn't tell me what I have to do to correct the problem. Nothing about even where it's looking for keys, what is supposed to create the key or how I am supposed to create the key. There are other examples and discussion of what they should say in the link. Edit: Here's another one that I filed: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/20775