Podman Desktop v1.5 with Compose onboarding and enhanced Kubernetes pod data

[drzaiusx11]

After docker desktop became unusable, I jumped to colima and never looked back. I still use the docker runtime in it (the non-proprietary part) but it also supports containerd. On Mac it's just a "brew install colima" and then "colima start"

I also install the compose and ecr credentials plug-ins (since I use ecr for my container registry.) It has the full functionality of docker desktop minus the UI, which I never used anyways.

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

[gigatexal]

I moved from the Mac platform for all the hoops you have to run though to run containers. On Linux I can do it without a VM. (I also hated window management — hello Sway — and the hardware is cheaper).

I’ve moved from Docker to podman as well on Linux. Love it.

[aequitas]

I've been using Colima for the past few months now instead of Docker for Mac and it's running great. Only issue I experience is that there is sometimes a delay after saving before files are synced to the container (using volumes), so when you run a test directly after saving it will still use the old file, or even worse, files that are still in transit, so you have to run your test again a few seconds later.

Been using Orbstack now for a few days and it seems to not have the same file syncing issue, and is faster in every other regard compared to Docker for Mac or Colima.

[mplanchard]

We tried to use podman at work (via nix) and ran into all kinds of confusing issues, especially in regards to docker in docker and CI builds. Swapped to using colima (again via nix) for the mac folks and regular docker engine for linux, and things have been much smoother. Definitely recommended if your podman setup is as difficult as ours was.

[ShellfishMeme]

For MacOS I can really recommend https://orbstack.dev

It integrates very nicely, has very low CPU idle usage and also lets you quickly spawn VMs with bidirectional file sharing set up.

Since I switched I haven't looked back.

[tacker2000]

I tried to use colima instead of Docker Desktop several months ago on my Mac, but I ran into several difficult issues (i think relating to folder mounts) and gave up.

[tecoholic]

Thanks for sharing this. I got a new M2 mac and installed Podman as I didn’t want the Docker Desktop as well. But ran into multiple issues and gave up and have been begrudgingly putting up with Docker Desktop.

My main complaints are: * the builds fail randomly * containers don’t stop when I run docker compose stop from CLI

So, I have to restart Docker Desktop a couple of times to reset everything. Does running the docker runtime with colima also gets into these issues?

[elbear]

What is the compose plugin? I don't see a reference to it on the github page

[pydry]

I wish they'd give podman compose just a little bit of love. It's been in a perpetual alpha state for a few years now. E.g.

https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues/626

https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues/489

The PRs are being neglected too e.g.:

https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/pull/521

[Rapzid]

I was under the impression they were sidelining compose in favor of their k8s manifest flavor which.. Well, let's just say I've never been in a compose file and thought "Man, I wish I was writing k8s manifest syntax".

[janejeon]

We've been using podman compose for semi-production purposes at our company and that's been our experience as well. It's just... it's really rough, there are a ton of "known" issues, and it's rather unreliable. As a result, I've been really trying to push the "just use the docker daemon in prod instead" (to no avail... yet).

[Volundr]

Out of curiosity, why do you not want to use the real docker compose with podman, now that it's supported?

[MuffinFlavored]

Why not write a Helm chart and deploy it locally with Helm or ArgoCD?

[sodality2]

I use podman compose in my SaaS to automate and make deployment easier for docker containers, it works great in my simple docker compose (image, name, port expose, volume. that’s it). I suppose use case matters, and mine is very simple, but i’ll just toss one more N=1 in the ring.

[mogwire]

I think this is on purpose. Podman is suppose to be a stepping stone to OpenShift. They don’t want people using it for anything other than development.

How many workloads that are currently on OpenShift could sit on a RHEL server behind a load balancer and work just as well?

I would wager that the average OpenShift cluster is under 10 nodes, runs COTS software, and a bunch of security and logging apps like Dynatrace and just sits there primarily under utilizes because the COTS vendor is a RH partner and stopped shipping RPMs and said we only support OpenShift moving forward.

[lomereiter]

Glad to see usability improvements here, but I won't be using it until there's a light theme (asking an application to respect the OS theme is apparently too much these days).

[shaan7]

I had to hard facepalm reading the other replies to this. There are people suffering from things like Astigmatism (myself included) who have an extremely hard time, including headaches, using dark themes. People really need to be a bit more empathetic.

Also, as the OP pointed out, people somehow get angry when all you asked is for an app to follow the system's theme. It has been such a huge regression.

EDIT: typos and clarity

[eikenberry]

Welcome to the club. So many things still don't support a dark theme either. Why aren't dark/light modes standard these days? Super annoying to have to hide a bunch of light mode windows when I'm in a meeting as they reflect brightly off my glasses.

[westurner]

"Light mode button?" https://github.com/containers/podman-desktop/issues/576

[smilingemoji]

[deleted]

[StevePerkins]

Where are we at on Podman these days?

If I recall, Podman really caught fire with this community after Docker started trying to charge more people for software. But then Red Hat (i.e. Podman's sponsor) started trying to charge more people for software too, and also became a pariah with this community. It's hard to keep up.

[IshKebab]

I used instead of Docker for a while because it came by default on RHEL (I'm using 8).

It has very impressive compatibility with Docker. For 99% of use cases you will not even know you are using Podman. The one case that forced me to uninstall it and use Docker was running `gitlab-runner`'s integration tests which do some funny things with Vagrant and VMWare, and Podman didn't like it. But overall I am very impressed with the compatibility.

There aren't really any advantages to using it for individual users. Being rootless is a huge upside on the server though. At my previous company I accidentally deleted all the containers running on a server because I naively assumed that Docker followed the normal permission model and would only let me delete my containers. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Docker basically runs as root and all users that have access to Docker have root access!

Of course I only made that mistake once, but still... Crazy design.

[Matl]

Podman is not the sole product of the people behind it, so they're less motivated to go down the Docker hole, imo.

[qudat]

If you need to use buildx it is a slog to get right. The split between root and rootless is also wrought with forking guides and very confusing to triage. For example, rootless needs more care with capabilities.

[sirsinsalot]

I managed to build and run a Docker compose setup that had been used exclusively with Docker for years without issue.

The problem came when trying to get other systems to talk to Podman in place of Docker. It just ... didn't work.

[mogwire]

> But then Red Hat (i.e. Podman's sponsor) started trying to charge more people for software too

Podman is free as is Podman Desktop.

Red Hat didn’t raise its prices.

CentOS Streams and Fedora is still free.

Oh you mean they made it difficult for Rocky to build the SRPMs. Sorry sorry. Hard to keep up with the FUD.

[paravz]

podman and podman-compose became mainstream and replaced docker for me in "server" scenarios on rhel8/rhel9, fedora and derivatives. Glad to see progress on the desktop!

[EatFlamingDeath]

Podman Desktop is getting really good. But the only thing preventing me from using Podman right now is the fact that Docker has BuildKit, and BuildKit has some really nice features like Secret Mounts, Cache Mounts and SSH Mounts.

[tapoxi]

I've been using it since I migrated our container builds to buildah (docker-dind is spooky) and I needed something Docker-Desktopy without paying for a license. Works great. Even supports Docker Desktop plugins, which was a surprise.

[wtfishackernews]

If you're using Linux (especially with Gnome), I can highly recommend Pods[1] as a desktop client for Podman. It's much less cluttered than Podman Desktop, but still supports most of its features.

[1] https://github.com/marhkb/pods#readme

[ksynwa]

Can someone link me to what Compose means in this context? Google takes me to https://github.com/containers/podman-compose but I just wanna make sure that's what they are talking about.

[ivzhh]

https://github.com/compose-spec/compose-spec/blob/master/spe...

[acheong08]

I do prefer podman over docker. It just feels lighter (idk what it’s like under the hood)

[marcrosoft]

Have they fixed the macOS time drift issue yet?

[zanecodes]

No, they also haven't fixed the machine "failing to start" (but actually starting anyway) and not mounting volumes. I'm switching back to Docker.

[gbraad]

You mean the time skew when you have your machine sleep (close the lid), right? We have fixed this a while back; this was part of CRC almost 2 years back and we backported this to Podman Machine. If you still see this, let me know and I'll have someone look at this again.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Why are we lumping a Linux kernel feature (cgroups) on top of macOS?

[nimbius]

Why or how is this different from running podman in Ubuntu/fedora/Linux?

[least]

It is a GUI for working with podman, docker, and kubernetes. It is functionally similar to Docker Desktop, which is also just a GUI to work with containers. It is a tool for those that prefer working with containers with a GUI instead of the terminal.

[msgilligan]

Well the most significant difference [on macOS or Windows] is you must use a VM (by default Podman Machine) so there can be a Linux kernel to run the containers.

This is a significant limitation that you do not have when running on Linux. As I recall there are some other (related?) features that are not implemented on the macOS.

[edited to reflect that I misread the parent and thought they were specifically asking what was different on non-Linux platforms)

[denysonique]

Another Electron app that isn't visually integrated with Linux -- under GNOME/Wayland the app does not have native or at least native looking window buttons, it also has sharp edges without a shadow behind the window, as all other apps.

This is a surprise as Podman Desktop development is lead by RedHat, a company not only behind a Linux distro but one that leads the GNOME project.

[hackandthink]

Podman Desktop is mostly for Windows users.

But Electron still feels like a wrong choice. Plugins for Visual Studio Code or Eclipse would be nice.

[spandextwins]

I'm a little confused, podman is just IBM docker, right?

[spandextwins]

I was right, it's redhat docker.