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Comment by kristjansson | Hacker News Reader

> Podman is a tool for running Linux containers. You can do this from a MacOS desktop as long as you have access to a linux box either running inside of a VM on the host, or available via the network. You need to install the remote client and then setup ssh connection information.

Literally the first non-title element in your link. Just because the client is cross-platform doesn't mean the entire solution is turn-key cross-platform.

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That's exactly what docker desktop does as well. A Macos or Windows client that runs docker in a Linux VM. There is a really limited concept of container on Windows, but it's far from being great and since not much people use Windows in production to run apps, this is not really usefull.

Well yeah, sure, but Docker for Mac/Windows installs the VM, sets up host-guest file shares, papers over networking and VPN stuff, etc.

I was going to say that installing Podman on macOS/Windows leaves the VM as an exercise to the user, but per another comment, there's podman-machine[1], a new-ish built in to setup a VM. However, it's apparently already deprecated (?) and recommends simply 'Vagrant' as an alternative, so seemingly setting up the VM is back to being a user exercise for Podman?

[1]: https://github.com/boot2podman/machine

The integration (the Linux VM is transparent to the user) is what makes all the difference.

This is currently its big weakness in my opinion.

Most of the problems that devs are facing with docker are not actually docker but this layer that tries to abstract the VM. So in the end, it's quite common that you have fix things in the VM or get rid of it. I don't know if docker on WSL2 makes the matter better, none of the devs in my team using Windows can use it because of the memory usage bug.

Oh yes, whilst Docker was created to help developers to think operationally, it (ironically) ended up helping Developers to not think about operations at all.

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