Podman Desktop 1.11: Light mode, Kubernetes features, macOS improvements

I'm remarkably impressed with Podman Desktop. I rarely use GUI tools as they rarely offer me more than what a CLI can, but Podman Desktop is becoming a sort of system dashboard or cockpit for me. It's getting quite feature rich. The k8s support is unexpected but appreciated, though I do wish it had better support for multiple kube config files. On the CLI I use aliases (sometimes env vars) to specify the kube config file, but in Podman desktop for some reason it won't use the env vars that it's supposed to. I built it such that there is no default cluster. It requires explicit specifying of the cluster. I did this intentionally so that commands never accidentally run against prod. With Podman Desktop, I can hack around the bug by symlinking ~/.kube/config to the one I want, but then my explicit specifying is gone and it's possible to accidentally be connected to prod when I think it's staging. My biggest feature request for Podman Desktop: support for multiple kube configs and let me label them with environment so it's immediately clear which env I'm talking to.

Used to be that people would wait ages for applications to get a "Dark mode", I find it funny how now we have to wait for "light mode" instead.

Even so, good to see that arriving. I've been experimenting recently and I've found podman very useful compared to my previous experiences trying to do containery stuff. ( Admittedly a very long time ago now which burned me and put me off trying again for a long time. )

Podman Destop is surprisingly bad on MacOS. It has a kind of proxy-like/userspace network driver. That means your tcp connection shown in a host system through `netstat`. ICPM is not implemented and always returns success. Try running `ping 66.0.0.0` or any other non-existing IP from the container and see. At that moment I'll continue using, well, podman in a Linux VM running UTM.

For basic dev container stuff, I switched to podman and I'll not go back to Docker. It works great and it being daemonless is just a cherry on top.

If you are on macOS, give OrbStack a shot. It works surprisingly well and fast.

I'm a fan of Rancher Desktop -- it has everything integrated and working out of the box, it can even provide the CLI tools like docker, kubectl or helm for you.

On the other hand, in Podman Desktop, you can't even use an image from Podman Desktop docker in Podman Desktop kubernetes without extra steps. I'd recommend it only if you want Podman specifically. If you just want to run docker and/or kubernetes, I'd go with Rancher Desktop.

Initial experience on random (fresh-ish install) Windows laptop: Bad. Creates VM, and then can't find it. Now I can install Hyper-V management tools to get rid of it...

Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Command execution failed with exit code 125 Error: vm "podman-machine-default" already exists on hypervisor

With all of these great improvements in recent months i'd love to see an updated roadmap... https://github.com/containers/podman-desktop/wiki/Roadmap

Anyone know if there’s a way to get access to devices in a container on MacOS yet? (Eg USB webcam, MPS or CUDA accelerator)