Podman Desktop 1.0

I&#x27;m excited to see this finally happen—acknowledgement that Docker Desktop has been an essential part of the process of onboarding devs (who often use the command line, but sparingly) into containerized development with a gentle on-ramp.<p>The big question is whether Podman Desktop will be (a) stable and not a memory-hog, (b) make container workflows on Mac&#x2F;Windows as simple (conceptually at least) as on Linux, and (c) be a sustainable effort for the community that&#x27;s still extremely Red Hat-centric.<p>To that last point, I still see very little adoption outside of the Red Hat ecosystem. It seems like `docker-ce` is still installed on most servers, `docker-compose` for lightweight app orchestration, and when people use Kubernetes, few people know or care what underlying container management daemon is running.

Related:<p><i>Podman Desktop: Same functionality as Docker Desktop but open source</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35296165" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35296165</a> - March 2023 (36 comments)<p><i>Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33536978" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33536978</a> - Nov 2022 (191 comments)<p><i>Podman Desktop Companion GUI – Parity on All Major Operating Systems</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31055475" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31055475</a> - April 2022 (113 comments)

Just for fun i thought i’d try to trip this up by hosting my podman containers on a remote x64 host:<p><pre><code> x64$ podman system service -t 0 &amp; x64$ systemctl enable --now --user podman.socket </code></pre> Then telling podman on my m1 macbook air to use the remote machine rather than spinning up a podman machine locally on the m1:<p><pre><code> m1$ podman system connection add fedora --identity ~&#x2F;.ssh&#x2F;id_rsa --port 22 ssh:&#x2F;&#x2F;craig@s1.local&#x2F;run&#x2F;user&#x2F;1000&#x2F;podman&#x2F;podman.sock m1$ podman system connection default fedora </code></pre> but it actually works just fine \o&#x2F; either way this is pretty but i’ll stick to the cli.

Anyone have any experience running Windows and WSL2 with Podman Desktop? I&#x27;m running W11, with fedora in WSL2. What I&#x27;ve been doing with Docker Desktop is running Docker Desktop on Windows startup, and that gives me access to the docker machine in both powershell and inside my wsl2 environment (for the latter, docker-desktop installs a binary inside fedora-wsl2 at `&#x2F;usr&#x2F;local&#x2F;bin&#x2F;docker` that communicates to the host)<p>So far, I uninstalled Docker-Desktop and installed Podman-Desktop, and now I can run `podman` from powershell but not from fedora. I&#x27;m about to try `sudo dnf install podman` and hope it connects to the podman-machine? I dunno, it&#x27;s not exactly clear

Docker Desktop provides some compelling options for lowering the barrier of entry for selfhosting. Today you can take a Windows laptop and run just about any Linux service, with pretty fast networking and host disk access. No CLI experience required. The only major missing piece is inbound networking from the internet. Tunneling[0] is my preferred solution to that problem. Or if you don&#x27;t want to expose your services to the internet there&#x27;s already a Tailscale extension[1].<p>It&#x27;s exciting and important to have an open source alternative in this space.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;anderspitman&#x2F;awesome-tunneling">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;anderspitman&#x2F;awesome-tunneling</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tailscale.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;docker&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tailscale.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;docker&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m waiting for Podman to hit AWS ECR&#x2F;ECS. Until then it&#x27;s just an interesting topic.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aws&#x2F;containers-roadmap&#x2F;issues&#x2F;626">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aws&#x2F;containers-roadmap&#x2F;issues&#x2F;626</a>

To quote the great pjmlp: Let me guess, Podman desktop is an Electron app.

Does the podman VM have Rosetta 2 acceleration or does it still use the slow qemu runtime on M series Macbooks? This is the main reason I switched to OrbStack which is a very promising alternative to all of this. Free for now but looks like they intend on making it a paid app in the future. The speed difference is significant.

Somewhat unrelated (but maybe it&#x27;s actually related). I&#x27;ve been trying to setup a local development environment for Kubernetes on mac. On mac, docker does not allow for connecting directly to the pods, you need to either setup a tunnel or service. The problem for my use case is that each pod could have a different port and local address and a load balancer does not make sense for what I&#x27;m building which requires connecting directly to a specific pod. Does Podman solve this problem? I think the problem is dockerd on mac. As of now, I just have a completely separate environment in the cloud that I run test on but it&#x27;s very inefficient.<p>I tried switching to nerdctl and containerd but the problem is that I have existing workflows that make use of docker_init files and nerdctl breaks those.

I really wish they&#x27;d give podman-compose some love.

I tried to use podman for a personal project.<p>It still has lots of documentation issues&#x2F;missing. Lots of little bugs and very little updates on stability.<p>Used wsl2 and ubuntu. Eventually gave up because it was just leading from one rabbit hole to the next.<p>Either use venv&#x2F;vagrant&#x2F;docker. Or just use native development workflow.<p>Podman is not worth the pain unless its for a mid size business or bigger.

I&#x27;ve been trying to get podman working with vscode and the docker extension for a while now...<p>Only to find out yesterday I had to downgrade the extension due to differences between docker and podman.

I’ve been using this on Mac for a few months now. It’s great to have an alternative to Docker desktop although it doesn’t feel fully there yet, on Mac at least. What is available in the UI is slick - but so many features are missing I often just end up back in the shell. Am experiencing a lot of strange behaviours in terminal sessions via the UI also, particularly hung sessions and it being way too easy to accidentally close the session by switching Ui tabs.

Earlier today I was browsing the Podman desktop website and pretty sure it was at 0.15 version, and then telling some people after that Podman desktop will probably reach stable sooner rather than later. However, does not expect it to be this very soon and it&#x27;s now suddenly stable at version 1.01. Apparently container software and ecosystem do move at a blazing speed.

Podman (Desktop) on Windows ate all my RAM when I left it up for a few days. Somehow it leaked wsl.exe &#x2F; podman.exe process handles every time it ran the &quot;podman machine&quot; commands it uses to keep track of its VM.

How does it work on Enterprise editions of Windows?

Does it support GPU acceleration? On Windows?

Not sure I particularly trust Redhat after what they did to CentOS.