Havn't tried Colima, but podman is very simple to use and smells like docker cli.

On Apple Silicon machines however, latest podman version uses VM images which Rosetta doesn't work with, and hence it will use qemu for running amd64 containers. You can fix this by either installing podman 5.5 or create the VM from and older image [1]. My only complaint here is that the stock machine images are pretty large (~1G )

If you use containers to run tools that create files in your host (i.e. build tools), then you can use your host username as the default in the VM (machine init --username $(id -un)), and then run containers with --userns=keep-id. That way the the container command starts with the same username and uid as you host user - this is pretty tricky to get working with docker, from my experience.

We use Bazel as our build tool and we create a lot of images based on shared layers. Bazel produces oci layout directories that contain descriptors and symlinks to the actual layer tars. Podman can start a container "directly" from these directories[2], which speeds up image testing considerably, since it can detect known layers immediately. With docker you have to stream a tarball with all the layers and descriptors to the docker daemon, only for it to discover that it already knows most of the layers.

[1] https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-machine-ini... - machine images https://quay.io/repository/podman/machine-os

[2] podman run oci://<path to oci-layout-dir>