Is there any practical benefit of Podman over Docker on a Mac? Virtual machine is still needed, so any performance issues are likely to persist (well, maybe Docker for Mac is a bit more buggy, but we can manually setup Docker instead of Podman in a similar way).
Also, I think we are losing here access to the Docker socket on the host (inside the virtual machine it can be emulated using docker-podman).
Podman does have a socket that can be started. I use it on Linux so I'm not sure how that works on MacOS but it's API is Docker compatible, thus works with the docker cli and docker-compose as well.
IIRC the podman socket is a planned thing for macOS as it'll be necessary for certain features that rely on the docker socket and don't use SSH, such as VSCode's Remote Containers extension.
However you can create an SSH tunnel to create the socket locally to allow non-podman clients to utilize the socket over SSH with the DOCKER_HOST environment variable.
# Get URI
> podman system connection ls
# Create tunnel
> ssh -nNT -L/tmp/podman.sock:/run/user/1000/podman/podman.sock -i ~/.ssh/podman-machine-default ssh://core@localhost:[PORT]
# Export socket location
> export DOCKER_HOST='/tmp/podman.sock'
The podman socket can be used to connect stuff to podman.
For example, a GUI program or even docker-compose.
However I must admit that I'm having serious troubles with podman+docker-compose (rhel 8.4, podman 3.2.3) so I reverted to podman-compose (which is way lower in quality and completeness).
Not having to pay Docker Inc to use it is the big advantage along with the security that comes with a solution that isn’t the meal ticket of the company that makes it so it will likely live on community supported for a long time.
> Not having to pay Docker Inc to use it is the big advantage
It’s mind boggling to me how much HN refuses to pay (only for company licensing) for the innovation that is Docker, and would rather find alternatives to the tooling around it.
> solution that isn’t the meal ticket of the company
Usually I’ve seen arguments the other way around - X will do a good job /because/ it’s their core offering.
When software companies switch to subscription-only models (see 1Password) you better not be invested in the software too much or you'll be at their price gouging mercy.
I'll happily pay for software but I won't support subscription-based models, ever.
You’re conflating consumer and corporate purchasing. By and far, companies prefer subscription based pricing that comes with ongoing support. Consumers also want support and updates, but have an irrational desire to not pay the company/people that provide it…
It's from RedHat/IBM. They can give this stuff away to developers because they just want to sell OpenShift to deep pocketed Enterprise customers. And really podman is strategically a defensive move so their Enterprise offerings aren't stuck depending on Docker Inc.
Contrast with Docker, whose business is explicitly focused on "developer tools."
So podman is funded ultimately by enterprises which is OK, but now docker wants to fund their products by enterprises that's a problem for some reason...
I could understand this if they were turning the thumbscrews on individuals but all this talk of switching sounds petty and silly and will probably be false economy
I suspect it's the bait-and-switch approach that annoys people. Podman (and RHEL, through community rebuilds) is free to use even for enterprises; you don't pay for the software itself, you pay for support.
> I could understand this if they were turning the thumbscrews on individuals but all this talk of switching sounds petty and silly and will probably be false economy
Well, with respect to this post in particular, I don't think Podman is even a "real" replacement for Docker Desktop. RHAT has been pushing it for quite a while, and although they're dogfooding it with their own k8s and Linux distros it's had less uptake outside of Big Blue (the linked article, prominently featured on their web page, is already out of date - not a good look). As many rough edges as my Mac using colleagues described encountering with Docker Desktop, they will see even more if they try to use Podman, so it strikes me as a poor choice here.
Regardless, I think the value proposition of Docker Desktop is questionable. The main thing it does is manage some VM plumbing so you don't have to think about it. Is that worth... much? Even anything at all? In a past life many of us used Vagrant, and it's not like it's that hard to do this stuff yourself.
So really, Docker Desktop is competing on multiple fronts, all of which are open source or at least free. There's old school, with Vagrant/BYO VM, there's "docker alternatives" like podman, and there's the k8s-in-a-box like Rancher Desktop or Minikube (which can expose a docker socket so you can work with docker directly as well).
I'm a Linux user so I don't have a dog in this fight, but if I lived in a world where I needed "run a VM to get a docker for development" it's not obvious to me that Docker Desktop is the best choice at any price point, and the cost is just one more point against it.
There was already some bad feeling towards Docker, because they historically haven't fixed bugs or added requested features.
When Docker started asking for money for their desktop offering, it prompted people to start wondering just how valuable that offering was, and to compare it against competing applications. Also, a lot of developers I've spoken to just don't see the point of the Docker Desktop on Mac; they just want something that sits in the background and works without bugging them to update every other week.
Podman fits the use cases people have, it's open source and has more useful features than Docker Desktop currently has.
You're correct in that this sounds petty and silly, but there's history and context to this widespread move to ditch Docker.
That’s how Red Hat operates mostly. Time will tell if IBM royally messes this up but Red Hat is an upstream first company. If they need something they will put up the developer time but it will be a community project first that they repackage for RHEL.
Red Hat’s secret sauce so to speak is the stupid amount of ongoing work it takes to actually maintain a distro, not the software itself.
Because the future of the product now depends on the enterprise customers paying enough for it to not only fund the development but also fund the business backing it.
OSS works best when software is needed by many different enterprises that all need it for their business but it isn’t a direct revenue generator. Because then the future is guaranteed since all of those enterprises will contribute patches and it makes financial sense for any of them to take on the maintainership.
Docker Desktop has always been a single point of failure in development terms not being OSS, but the community of users just got slashed not that there’s a price tag attached to it and by charging Docker has basically said that the future of the product now depends on it turning a profit instead of before when it only depended on Docker Inc overall turning a profit.
As a typical mac user there is no practical benefit.
Being on a Mac is so you can avoid lengthy configurations, scripts and commands and instead have something that just works and is seamlessly integrated.
This is the opposite.
You’d probably only want to go this route to make a statement about free open source software. But at that point you may as well run Linux
The Docker daemon (likely the HyperKit VM) on the Mac has a tendency to burn CPU cycles, even when there are no containers running. It's pretty common for it to sit at 10-20% of a core all day, and sometimes gets pegged at 100% until you quit.
There are countless closed issues in the GitHub issue tracker [1] for similar issues, but the symptoms don't seem to go away for me or many of my colleagues.
It's been a pretty awful experience on Mac for a long time, so any competition is surely welcome.
I had the same frustrations until the other day I saw a tip to enable 'Use the new Virtualization framework' under Preferences -> Experimental Features. Since then Docker's background CPU usage has dropped to 1% and I no longer bother stopping it when I'm not using it.
I'm happy your platform of choice has no bugs nor quirks. Could you let us know which one it is? We can probably help you find the bullshit you put up with that has become second nature.
Also, I think we are losing here access to the Docker socket on the host (inside the virtual machine it can be emulated using docker-podman).