Docker. It's been around longer, it's more polished, easier to learn, simpler to use, supported everywhere and by everything, easy to find solutions when you search for help, doesn't depend on systemd, compatible with every container image out there, and you can do things with it even if it's not the "correct" way to do it while podman will tell you "no, you can't do that".

If your distro offers it, rootless podman + podman system service is the best setup, IMO. That will give you a docker command that is 1-to-1 compatible with docker and lets you use tools like docker-compose that expect a docker service socket. Then you can just follow tutorials that only explain things for docker.

Podman, rootless containers work well, and there is no central process running everything. I like that starting containers on boot is integrated with systemd.

Don't overthink this. Just start using something.

Podman, dockerd is a single point of failure

I'd go Docker for the maturity. Podman is nice but I've definitely had some issues, and Buildah lacks any sort of caching and does unnecessary intermediate copies of the layers when pushing to a repository that really slows things down on larger apps/images.

definitely docker. it just has so much more documentation and community involvement.

On what host system?

If you're running it for your own network, just use Docker. The tooling is way, way better for docker, especially for a beginner.

my reaction

Docker because it just works. Podman has another 5 years (hopefully) to get this part right IMO.

Docker if you are unsure how to begin. You can use docker compose with configs you find on the internet.

If your interested in podman I would start by using it though distrobox. Distrobox is a tool that allows other Linux environments on your host system and is really good for development

I do a lot of docker/k8s at work, and I use podman at home. Podman is very cool in theory but still rough around the edges. I recommend docker if you just want to get started, Podman is a little extra work.

A year or two ago (whenever docker changed the business license of docker for Mac) I changed to podman and aliased docker=podman. It behaves the same, you would just about never know rootful podman vs docker.

Rootless podman is super cool and a much better security ideal - but comparing more apples to apples would be podman running as root vs docker.

I use podman, even when I started out. But I am a tinkerer. I think for the average beginner, docker will be easier as so much out there assumes you are using Docker only, and hard codes it. Unless you wanna deal with that, use Docker.

I started with Docker and then migrated to Podman for the integrated Cockpit dashboard support. All my docker-compose files work transparently on top of rootful Podman so the migration was relatively easy. Things get finicky when you try to go rootless though.

I say try both. Rootful podman is gonna be closest to the Docker experience.

Whichever one is better supported by the containers you want to run.