Last time I evaluated podman, Ubuntu was second class citizen. Rootless was non trivial and required additional setup. Documentation also suck.

Docker is something we all already hate, milion edge cases and forever bugs but at least well documented and understood. Podman claim to be drop-in replacement does it mean it carry docker shitness? Examples: ufw punch through, env file handling, volumes, etc

Last time I tried rootless podman was about 6 months ago and it was a total mess. I was trying to use it to run a container as me (user 1000) and mount a directory from my home (owned by user 1000) and it drove me and Claude around the bend. It's not a podman vs docker thing per se, just rootless being a total pain. However I just enabled the docker service, ran the same command on docker and it worked. I think I just left docker running after that. I realised that on my home setup I don't care enough to fight with it. Sometimes you just want to do the thing you want to do and not turn it into a 4 hour learning session about some side shit.

With recent advances in both systemd and podman a lot of this is basically a non-issue.

Documentation has also gotten better.

For tools that require docker to work, like testcontainers and tilt, I've found some annoyances using podman, but ultimately I've been able to work around them.

For everything else, it's pretty much a drop in replacement.

One of the key design principles of podman was rootless operation; they were so disgusted by Docker being a daemon they decided to do a full open source implementation. I've never had an issue with it running without root.