Ok, this one is “interesting”: podman-compose have a dev brach that has some lots of things addressed, but they don’t have any recent tags and it’s not clear if they are going too. There is an issue somewhere, alluding that development is stalled because k8s is the way or similar thing.
Looks like it. Last time I tried it, I wasn't able to use it because of this. I don't use or need kubernetes. I do use docker and docker-compose. A lot. On basically all my projects. It's not optional for me. So, sadly, Podman is not a usable docker desktop replacement for me.
I used qemu for a while on my old macbook with a linux vm that had ssh installed. You can actually make docker use a remote machine via ssh and with some environment variable magic you can actually make things like docker-compose work that way. A bit tricky with mounting volumes and forwarding ports of course but you can make that work as well. You can use ssh to forward local ports to a remote machine and you can setup qemu to share directories to the vm. It is a bit tedious to manage but I used this for several months with some scripts to set this up. So, having done this manually, that raises the question why Podman can't do this?
I reverted back to using docker desktop when I got my M1 macbook last year. It's just easier. But it would be nice to have some alternative if the need ever arises. If Podman improves their docker-compose support I might give it another try.
