I’m running podman and podman-compose with no problem. And I’m happy. At first I was confused by the uid and gid mapping the containers have, but you’ll get used to it.

This are some notes I took, please don’t take all of it for the right choice.

Podman-Stuff

https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorials/rootless_tutorial.md

storage.conf

To use the fuse-overlay driver, the storage must be configured:

.config/containers/storage.conf

[storage]
  driver = "overlay"
  runroot = "/run/user/1000"
  graphroot = "/home/<user>/.local/share/containers/storage"
  [storage.options]
    mount_program = "/usr/bin/fuse-overlayfs"

Lingering (running services without login / after logout)

https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/12001

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/462845/how-to-apply-lingering-immedeately#462867

sudo loginctl enable-linger <user>

I use podman almost exclusively at this point. I like having the rootless containers and secrets management. If you’re on Debian, though, I strongly suggest pulling podman from Trixie. The version in Bookworm is very out of date and there’s been a lot of fixes since then.

Podman not because of security but because of quadlets (systemd integration). Makes setting up and managing container services a breeze.

Podman

• rootless by default
• daemonless
• integration with systemd, made even easier by podman-generate-systemd
• no third-party APT repository required, follows the same lifecycle as my LTS (Debian) distro
• podman and docker command-line are 100% compatible for my use cases