Buildah (which may well work with Docker, but is a Podman peer) is the killer feature in my opinion. Dockerfiles are unadulterated shite. One of my pet peeves is "bored developers" writing DSLs/programming languages (especially in YAML, but that isn't the case here) when an off-the-shelf language would have done. Dockerfiles are a genuinely fantastic example of why this nonsense needs to end.

To see why, look at Buildah without `bud`. Instead of a silly DSL that becomes annoying the second your use-case veers an inch off the happy path, you can use Bash, or Fish, or whatever it is that you want.

These types of bad decisions carry the into the rest of the Docker ecosystem. DCS and it's (perpetually incomplete) replacement are yet more examples: instead of using established signing protocols (like Cosign does) they had the desire to build an obnoxiously complex and hard to automate (especially key rotation) system.

Are you bridging to the main eth interface on the host? (not just a KVM private bridge). Can you share your KVM configs?

Podman is free. Docker is also free, but a pain to install docker without docker desktop.

No pain at all.