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cdrage • today at 2:53 PM • 5 replies • view on HN

What sort of compatibility issues were you encountering? (disclaimer: I'm on the Podman Desktop team)

If it was compose + docker compatibility issues, that's on the roadmap for improvement :). Compose support is flakey at times (it's essentially a wrapper around the open source binary https://github.com/docker/compose)

Replies

enlightens • today at 2:57 PM

The most common one I run into is with volumes, when the full path doesn't already exist. Docker will just make the path, Podman throws an error. It's been called a "bug" in docker but the fact is everyone just expects the paths to be created. I want it to just work, not make everyone in the industry redo their dockerfiles to be "correct."

https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/6234

It looks like there was some work done to resolve this in 2023 and 2024 but I know this was still happening for me in mid 2025. Podman is technically correct here but functionally broken in a way that keeps pushing me away because I don't have time to deal with that :(

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amluto • today at 3:29 PM

I’ve encountered this one:

https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/6460

Also, there’s Podman’s decision to drop CNI support. Sure, I get that they want to support the full stack, but netavark is really not especially capable, and CNI allows all kinds of interesting (and frequently overcomplicated) things.

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jph • today at 6:30 PM

If you're open to questions, I'm switching my teams from Docker to Podman on macOS. I'm hitting blockers for multi-user setups i.e. each developer has a non-admin account on the machine, whereas brew runs in its own account with admin permissions.

I would love a way to have Podman installable in userspace meaning in a non-admin account, or installable without brew, or with a dependency list such as QEMU or whatever else needs to be installed by an admin ahead of time, or with a sudousers config list, etc.

I know this is an atypical setup. Any advice from anyone here is much appreciated about multi-user non-admin macOS container setup for Podman or Docker or equivalent.

fodkodrasz • today at 3:41 PM

I had issues with performance/power management, and had to abandon Podman Desktop on Windows. Have not checked out recently, but my issues may possibly be solved by

https://github.com/podman-desktop/podman-desktop/issues/1035...

Basically I had a 5 second periodic CPU spike after some update. Also I had some compose issues, and some issue with Fedora based WSL. These together were blockers for me at that point, but I'm using podman on my pet Fedora server, and it works (using quadlets there) perfectly there, and will retry it on Windows also when I get the time.