Don’t overthink this. Just start using something.

definitely docker. it just has so much more documentation and community involvement.

A year or two ago (whenever docker changed the business license of docker for Mac) I changed to podman and aliased docker=podman. It behaves the same, you would just about never know rootful podman vs docker.

Rootless podman is super cool and a much better security ideal - but comparing more apples to apples would be podman running as root vs docker.

Podman, dockerd is a single point of failure

I started with Docker and then migrated to Podman for the integrated Cockpit dashboard support. All my docker-compose files work transparently on top of rootful Podman so the migration was relatively easy. Things get finicky when you try to go rootless though.

I say try both. Rootful podman is gonna be closest to the Docker experience.

I use podman, even when I started out. But I am a tinkerer. I think for the average beginner, docker will be easier as so much out there assumes you are using Docker only, and hard codes it. Unless you wanna deal with that, use Docker.

If you’re running it for your own network, just use Docker. The tooling is way, way better for docker, especially for a beginner.

Whichever one is better supported by the containers you want to run.

I do a lot of docker/k8s at work, and I use podman at home. Podman is very cool in theory but still rough around the edges. I recommend docker if you just want to get started, Podman is a little extra work.

Docker because it just works. Podman has another 5 years (hopefully) to get this part right IMO.