O.O this may be the feature that gets me into podman over docker.

The shift from docker to podman was originally quite painful at first, but it's much better, very usable, and quite stable now.

Still, I can see the draw for independent devs to use docker compose. Teams and orgs though makes sense to use podman and systemd for the smaller stuff or dev, and then literally export the config as a kubernetes yaml.

How is podman managed in larger environments? It's designed around running rootless, but it seemed like the nature of that is there wasn't a proper way to centrally manage the containers even on just a single machine. Like even seeing the logs required using machinectl to get a shell as the user who owns the service (sudo/su do not retain the necessary environment variables for journalctl to work). Trying to get the logs as root seems to let you filter down to the user (rather than service) level at best.

Meanwhile, with Docker (or the not recommended rootful podman), you can have centralized management of multiple machines with a tool like Portainer.

I like the idea of podman, but this has been a head-scratcher for me.

The way you manage podman in large environments is called Kubernetes :)

podman is really only suitable for a single node, but they may have added things I have missed.

They're very cool. I actually combine them with Nix. Because why not.

https://github.com/SEIAROTg/quadlet-nix