How does podman replace docker desktop? I thought it more as an alternative to the docker daemon, which is still free and open source. I start to wonder if people actually value open source if they run away from something just because some company publishes a commercial GUI.
I like that with docker swarm one can without too much headache go from dev environments to a cluster. At university this seems much better than maintaining k8s. Podman seemed to be more interesting in rootless environments like HPC to me. I really what benefit switching to podman would actually bring to us.
Using any sort of Linux container runtime on Mac requires a VM, since you can't otherwise get the Linux kernel features required. Docker Desktop and podman machine will both do the VM provisioning for you, and then you can use docker the container engine or podman to actually drive containers in the VM it gives you. So it effectively can replace it because podman machine will provision a VM for you, but you can of course use any other VM provisioner you want. There is no need to have it coupled to the container engine.
It's worth noting if you have an M1 Mac, podman machine doesn't work on it yet. Docker Desktop does.
Of course, the easiest way to use containerization technology if that's what you want to do is just use Linux workstations and don't worry about needing a kernel virtualization layer between your workstation and your container engine at all.
Edit: Noting since sibling comments are discussing Windows and WSL that I'm talking specifically about replacing Docker Desktop on Mac because the article linked here is talking about using podman machine to replace Docker Desktop on Mac.
It is straightforward to get Podman up and running in WSL2; it is also possible to set up Docker in WSL2 as well without Docker Desktop as well but it is much more painful. So in the Windows space, Podman effectively becomes an alternative to Docker Desktop, simply because the latter makes it possible to do Docker at all (ignoring the other things it does).
I just noted that it seems to straight forward to extend machine via drivers and at least there is one for parallels. Also rancher seems to maintain a fork of machine itself so it seems unlikely to die as an alternative...
podman has a `machine` subcommand for setting up a VM for running podman. It configures the podman server and your podman client connects to the server, very much like docker.
I like that with docker swarm one can without too much headache go from dev environments to a cluster. At university this seems much better than maintaining k8s. Podman seemed to be more interesting in rootless environments like HPC to me. I really what benefit switching to podman would actually bring to us.