Ive been using Podman for a while for my non-Kubernetes cloud deployments (i.e. small VM based things).
It's worked very well for me after a few initial hiccups a year or so ago.
Now that Podman-compose[0] is in the works, it'll really be comparable in the UX space soon, and outperforms Docker in several ways when it comes to security.
The key difference with Podman compared to Docker is that is does not run a deamon as root, like Docker does, thus all containers are created with the privilege level of the user who created it.
This can be a learning curve for those used to Docker as privileges (e.g. for filesystems, files) and capabilities (e.g. for devices, low level networking) need to be handled more explicitly as opposed to Docker's approach of "simon (root) says".
Additionally, Podman is very light weight due to the lack of a daemon since there is no service or supporting software which needs to run beyond the capabilities baked into Linux.
[0] https://github.com/containers/podman-compose
EDIT TO ADD: I run Linux both on desktop and server so I have no data for usage in Windows/Mac. Docker Desktop, as I understand it, is a Linux VM.
It's worked very well for me after a few initial hiccups a year or so ago.
Now that Podman-compose[0] is in the works, it'll really be comparable in the UX space soon, and outperforms Docker in several ways when it comes to security.
The key difference with Podman compared to Docker is that is does not run a deamon as root, like Docker does, thus all containers are created with the privilege level of the user who created it.
This can be a learning curve for those used to Docker as privileges (e.g. for filesystems, files) and capabilities (e.g. for devices, low level networking) need to be handled more explicitly as opposed to Docker's approach of "simon (root) says".
Additionally, Podman is very light weight due to the lack of a daemon since there is no service or supporting software which needs to run beyond the capabilities baked into Linux.
[0] https://github.com/containers/podman-compose
EDIT TO ADD: I run Linux both on desktop and server so I have no data for usage in Windows/Mac. Docker Desktop, as I understand it, is a Linux VM.