Comment by slowin
8 hours ago
I prefer Podman most of the time, but Docker is/was amazing and a great DX put on top of the so called "5 different linux kernel features in trenchcoat". That's the selling point, it's super lightweight and takes full advantage of the OS features that were already there (or being developed) but were awkward to use and required tons of specialized knowledge.
Does Postman sidestep these weird things about Docker? Or just some of them?
I assume you mean podman?
The first two are just kind of the nature of containers on linux, and applies to any container technology.
Podman does allow you to run it as a non-root user (with some limitations), that was in fact one of the biggest motivations for making podman. This wasn't possible at all in the early days of docker, it wasn't until linux introduced user namespaces, where the root user inside the namespace mapped to a non-root user id outside the namespace that non-root conatiners were possible.
And podman, unfortunately IMO, is also written in go.
I switched to Podman because it’s daemon less (no resources are used unless a container is running) and it doesn’t need to run as root.
Otherwise it’s basically the same and you can continue using your Dockerfiles and Docker Compose files.
Unless you’re doing something really fancy it’s basically a drop-in replacement.
I think you meant "Podman", but yes, Postman almost entirely sidesteps docker.
:D
I think the only thing in the "weird things" list that don't necessarily apply to another container system on linux would be the go-specific issues.
Most of the other container runtimes don't require root for many of the use cases in which Docker does.