Podman Desktop celebrates 3M downloads
17 comments
·September 23, 2025osigurdson
arcanemachiner
> unlike docker in my experience
You have piqued my curiosity. What does Docker Desktop do that the CLI cannot?
danielnesbitt
Since they mention Windows, I believe this is a reference to the fact that you cannot (easily) install the Docker CLI without Docker Desktop. Podman does not have this issue.
dkga
Congratulations to the podman team!
htrp
I've seen podman advertised as a dropin docker replacement. how valid is that assertion?
dodos
Mostly valid. There are a few gotchas but for most use cases it is drop-in. I think I've run into issues with the podman socket, and there were some permissions problems I had getting games-on-whales setup in userspace.
jamesboehmer
I wasted my time trying podman and switched to colima. It's the only usable free alternative that's a true drop-in replacement for docker.
GauntletWizard
I had a brief period of setup pain and then have never looked back, though have occasionally wished that feature parity came a little quicker. Podman is in many ways a delight, simpler in what it does in the general case and yet as powerful as docker or more.
ashirviskas
Why podman and not Docker?
paulryanrogers
It's free? Can run rootless?
cowmix
On Snapdragon / ARM Windows, it is the only game in town -- and it works great too!
jrks11o
docker desktop licensing changes in 2021
seemaze
It supports Kubernetes *.yaml manifests?
2OEH8eoCRo0
Docker took too long to support cgroups v2
I'm glad they have podman desktop. Personally though, once I realized that I can use the command line version without it (unlike docker in my experience) I uninstalled it as I don't really need the UI / KIND, etc. For me the command line is fine and having something where I don't have to first shell into wsl is great (it just runs it itself behind the scenes). Of course, Linux is generally better for development imo but this is a nice compromise on Windows.