Making systemd a necessary dependency to run > 1 container kinda negates many of the the nice advantages that podman has of not requiring root.
podman compose doesnt require root and would serve as a substitute but it's a very neglected piece of software.
To replace a single docker compose file, sounds like one needs to manually create a number of .container, .volume, .network, .kube files correctly so systemd can spin up a container pod? Is that what I'm reading? Is there nothing that can generate that from a docker-compose.yml?
Working for one myself, which does have a support contract wit Red Hat, I kinda get where they're coming from--if they make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, dumb people shoot themselves in the foot in production and they have to fix the mess later. But for that they could have a sanctioned build for clients and a community build for everybody else, just like they have Fedora and RHEL.
systemd itself is a root service. it shouldnt be a necessary dependency to run > 1 containers without root. somehow it is.
systemd itself requires root.
and that particular init process did way more than any init process ever should even before somebody had the bright idea to add "docker compose substitite" to its ever growing list of responsibilities.
you could put a word processor and games in their too if you really wanted. is that a good idea? ill leave that for the reader's judgment.
It was a shitty decision that renders it just "a less popular docker" and not "a better docker".
systemctl --user ...But it is fun to see the marketing 360
1. Podman is simpler than Docker. There is no long-running daemon. Rootless is default.
2. Quadlets can be managed as systemd services, giving me the same tools to manage and view logs for system daemons and containers.
Quadlets have been especially nice for bundling up an AI app I wrote as a cloud-init file, making it easy to deploy the hardware, software and models as one artifact.