Why do you say podman is a poor replacement? It has been consistently a better replacement for me on Linux, with easy rootless, daemon less, quadlet, etc. And at work where I have to use macos, it works just as well.

The interfaces, CLI and Podman Desktop, are still not at parity. Podman contributors will be the first to tell you this.

That's not to say they aren't effective, or even good, at least for the CLI. They're just still catching up. It's not and shouldn't be a surprise considering the head start.

Yeah, people are sleeping on Podman who is now genuinely leading the space now that docker-engine is all but in maintenance mode.

Quadlets are amazing and greatly simplify the deployment and management of containers.

The systemd integration is so good because you have this battle tested process manager with a gazillion features and you can use them with your containers for free.

Podman can run pods, hence the name, which is an abstraction that k8s has proven is useful but docker completely lacks.

Podman pushing k8s manifests as an (imho better) compose with podman play is refreshing. And it can be dropped in with Quadlets too.

Podman can generate your k8s manifests from your running containers. Get everything running how you like and save.

buildah frees you from Dockerfile and lets you build containers completely rootlesslessly.