I really like Podman, and I'm happy to see this new release. This little nugget about non-released features makes me most excited though:
> More features, including support for volume mounts from the host, are planned for Podman v4.1, so stay tuned for more updates.
IIUC host volume mounts for podman-machine are the last major missing feature in Podman that would allow something like Podman Desktop Companion [1] to replace Docker Desktop on Windows/Mac for most use cases - if it works well. It'd be great to replace that nagging-for-updates and nagging-for-subscriptions with a completely open source replacement tool. (I'm sympathetic to the Docker team in need of a revenue source, but I'm really happy OCI containers on Mac and Windows can be made accessible without vendor lock-in).
Eh, not the only thing. Podman is definitely well on it's way, but my team builds tooling that builds and orchestrates our development environments. When we switched from docker to podman we immediately noticed how slow our container based build stage had become. Podman lacked some caching layer that docker was automatically orchestrating as well as parallel builds (without build kit, and build kit isn't super simple to integrate). Once we integrated build kit it made our build times very similar, but this was only possible because we had tooling to orchestrate build kit on top of podman.
As an aside, I recently tried to dabble with some BuildKit APIs and man that was one of the lowest quality Go codebases I've encountered. Probably the lowest hanging fruit would be documenting APIs. Podman (and IIRC Buildah) by comparison were clean, well documented, reasonable APIs were exposed, etc.
> More features, including support for volume mounts from the host, are planned for Podman v4.1, so stay tuned for more updates.
IIUC host volume mounts for podman-machine are the last major missing feature in Podman that would allow something like Podman Desktop Companion [1] to replace Docker Desktop on Windows/Mac for most use cases - if it works well. It'd be great to replace that nagging-for-updates and nagging-for-subscriptions with a completely open source replacement tool. (I'm sympathetic to the Docker team in need of a revenue source, but I'm really happy OCI containers on Mac and Windows can be made accessible without vendor lock-in).
[1]: https://iongion.github.io/podman-desktop-companion/