Podman Desktop will release Windows arm64 binaries if there is a demand for it

I work on the Windows enablement team of podman machine andam glad to take question or feature requests.

We are looking into enabling systemd, though as said, this isn't GA yet. The functionality would only work for Win11, so we have to enable a win10 workaround for this (we have), but this has to be based on feature detection.

Arm binaries is being looked at, but can't commit to a timeframe when this will be delivered.

Note: the Arm binary I suggest is an rnd to end solution with the WSL2 environment and client binaries.

If you dont mind some tinkering, a fedora Aarch64 container base image can be imported to wsl2 to install podman.

I've been using this approach for some time on my Pro X. I wrote a script to start the docker daemon on first shell startup prior to systemd support.

Thanks for this! I was curious if the windows dev kit would be a good arm64 container build box, but I wasn't sure if getting Docker or buildah etc. on there would be a pain. Sounds like this is totally doable.

I've been running Docker on WSL 2 for a while now, without systemd or Docker Desktop. There's no need to wait for systemd.

You can install Docker following their Linux guide and then in your shell's profile file add:

    if grep -q "microsoft" /proc/version &>/dev/null; then
        if service docker status 2>&1 | grep -q "is not running"; then
            wsl.exe --distribution "${WSL_DISTRO_NAME}" --user root \
                --exec /usr/sbin/service docker start >/dev/null 2>&1
        fi
    fi

Basically the first time you open a terminal it'll pause for 5 seconds while the Docker daemon is started but it'll stay started for the duration of your Windows uptime even if you close your terminal. The next time you open a terminal it'll be instant.

Been running Docker under WSL for a few years. Don't need systemd if you're either happy to start it manually with an alias or poke it into one of your profile/logon scripts.

The experience is light-years ahead of the monstrosity that is Docker Desktop