I was a huge fan of Podman, but I eventually gave up and use Docker Compose for local development. It's not worth fighting the system.

However, for single server deployments, where I don't need Kubernetes, I now exclusively use Quadlets to run apps and I couldn't be happier. It's a much nicer experience that using typical Docker/Podman setup. It feels integrated into the system.

> I was a huge fan of Podman, but I eventually gave up and use Docker Compose

You can mix them. I was using docker-compose with podman instead of docker before switching to quadlets. I still prefer the experience of compose files, but quadlets do integrate much better into systemd.