I use podman desktop on Windows for common development stuff as drop in replacement. I switched due to licensing as I guess universities do not fall under the licencing exceptions. I actually also use the docker CLI, particularly docker compose. I was motivated to do the same on one of our Debian vms, because I could more install podmap via standard apt sources, i hoped that it doesn't mess to that much with the IP stack and it is a bit closer to K8s which I still deemed as overkill. However, trying to install e.g. komo.do via podman compose was a total fail. Even after fixing socket locations, etc, I would see weird behavior. So yes, it is a clear 'almost'. However, the critical cases can become easily very frustrating. Again, on my windows laptop with WSL2 it works like a charm, but there I also do not run server deployments that need to work reliably out of the box.