Last time I evaluated podman, Ubuntu was second class citizen. Rootless was non trivial and required additional setup. Documentation also suck.
Docker is something we all already hate, milion edge cases and forever bugs but at least well documented and understood. Podman claim to be drop-in replacement does it mean it carry docker shitness? Examples: ufw punch through, env file handling, volumes, etc
Last time I tried rootless podman was about 6 months ago and it was a total mess. I was trying to use it to run a container as me (user 1000) and mount a directory from my home (owned by user 1000) and it drove me and Claude around the bend. It's not a podman vs docker thing per se, just rootless being a total pain. However I just enabled the docker service, ran the same command on docker and it worked. I think I just left docker running after that. I realised that on my home setup I don't care enough to fight with it. Sometimes you just want to do the thing you want to do and not turn it into a 4 hour learning session about some side shit.
Try without Claude. Happy rootless podman user since October. It just works.
Had similar issues with podman on a Steam Deck of mine that I use as a little home server - eventually got a configuration working fine but was a real pain.
With recent advances in both systemd and podman a lot of this is basically a non-issue.
Documentation has also gotten better.
For tools that require docker to work, like testcontainers and tilt, I've found some annoyances using podman, but ultimately I've been able to work around them.
For everything else, it's pretty much a drop in replacement.
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...
One of the key design principles of podman was rootless operation; they were so disgusted by Docker being a daemon they decided to do a full open source implementation. I've never had an issue with it running without root.
When have you tryed ? I have installed podman in Debian with a sudo apt install podman and I didn't to do anything special. It's rootless by default.