Could never get rootless to work properly. I wanted to like Podman, but every time I wanted to use it there was some bump in the road that made me give up and use Docker.

So did I ... But I've started writing my applications to run locally, in a WASM runtime and in a container so most of my debug and test occurs right on my OS.

Has anyone ported distrobox to MacOS? or know of a project doing that?

I could reverse engineer all the cool user land stuff it does to make things seamless ... but who has the time ;-)

I have used Podman before, and it just works. However, for the past 8 months, I've been using orbstack, and I can confidently say that it's much better.

I switched about 3 weeks ago. I’m not a power user of either. But I don’t smell the odor of coming enshitification anymore either. Podman doesn’t feel like a platform or an ecosystem. It’s just a tool.

Last third party container I’ve built had COPY —-link statements that didn’t worked on podman. Granted it worked just fine with a normal copy but it’s not 1:1.

The out of the box DX on podman needs improvement, the automated image management logic is bad, but besides that it's a pretty good tool.

I did the same first, then went with Colima, nowadays with Orbstack. My point is, there are so many great options apart from Docker Desktop

I use podman since I can simply enable it using home-manager:

`services.podman.enable`

This also means that it's in the reproducible part of my setup which is a bonus.