OP, listen to this person. Docker will earn you cash. Podman is nicer to work with for your own shit.

I've read somewhere on lemmy that the podman-compose is unmaintained and shouldn't be used. Can't find it now thought.

My goal is selfhosting stuff mainly on my raspberry pi. I'm sure I'm not going to work in IT for 3 years and probably not for at least few years after that.

Just to offer the other perspective. I started with podman years ago. I knew very little about containers and I would say it made the learbing curve a lot steeper. Most guides and README's use docker and when things didnt work I had to figure out if it was networking, selinux, rootless, not having the docker daemon, etc... without understanding fully what those things were because I didn't know docker. But when I started running stuff on kubernetes, it was really easy. Pods in podman are isomorphic to kubernetes pods. I think the pain was worth it, but it was definitely not easy at the time. Documentation, guides, and networking have improved since then, so it may not be as big of a deal now

Also I’m not sure about your claim that Podman is more FOSS than docker

The issue with Docker isn't the core product itself, is the ecosystem, it's the DockerHub, Kubernetes etc.

On the same machine I have Docker running as root and not as root. I choose which version, root-ful/root-less depending on what the container needs to do.

I think the only advantage is that Podman runs as root-less out of the box, where with Docker you have to do a few extra steps once it's installed.

First of all they make the user dumber. Instead of learning something new, you blindly “compose pull & up” your way. Easy, but it’s dumbifier and that’s not a good thing

I don't like this Docker trend because, besides what you've said, it 1) leads you towards a dependence on property repositories and 2) robs you from the experience of learning Linux (more later on) but I it does lower the bar to newcomers and let's you setup something really fast. In my opinion you should be very skeptical about everything that is "sold to the masses", just go with a simple Debian system (command line only) SSH into it and install what you really need, take your time to learn Linux and whatnot.

there is a dangerous trend where projects only release containers, and that’s bad for freedom of choice (bare metal install, as complex as it might be, need to always be possible) and while I am aware that you can download an image and extract the files inside, that’s more an hack than a solution

And the second danger there is that when developers don't have to consider the setup of a their solution the code tends to be worse. Why bother with having single binaries, stuff that is easy to understand and properly document things when you can just pull 100 dependencies and compose files? :) This is the unfortunate reality of modern software.

Third, with containers you are forced to use whatever deployment the devs have chosen for you. Maybe I don’t want 10 postgres instances one for each service, or maybe I already have my nginx reverse proxy or so

See? Poorly written software. Not designed to be sane and reasonable and integrate with existing stuff.

But be aware that containers are not the solution to selfhosting-made-easy and, specifically, containers havebeen created to solve different issues than self-hosting!

Your article said it all and is very well written. Let me expand a bit into the "different issues":

The thing with Docker is that people don’t want to learn how to use Linux and are buying into an overhyped solution that makes their life easier without understanding the long term consequences. Most of the pro-Docker arguments go around security, reproducibility and that’s mostly BS because 1) systemd can provide as much isolation a docker containers and 2) there are other container solutions and nobody cares about them.

Companies such as Microsoft and GitHub are all about re-creating and re-configuring the way people develop software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms - that's why nowadays everything and everyone is pushing for Docker/DockerHub/Kubernetes, GitHub actions and whatnot. We now have a generation that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some Docker BS or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.

Before anyone comments that Docker isn’t totally proprietary and there’s Podman consider the following: It doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of containerization technologies. In the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term.

Docker may make development and deployment very easy and lowered the bar for newcomers have the dark side of being designed to reconfigure and envelope the way development gets done so someone can profit from it. That is sad and above all set dangerous precedents and creates generations of engineers and developers that don’t have truly open tools like we did. There’s LOT of money into transitioning everyone to the “deploy-from-github-to-cloud-x-with-hooks” model so those companies will keep pushing for it.

At the end of the day technologies like Docker are about commoditizing development and about creating a negative feedback loop around it that never ends. Yes, I say commoditizing development because if you look at it those techs only make it easier for the entry level developer and companies instead of hiring developers for their knowledge and ability to develop they’re just hiring “cheap monkeys” that are able to configure those technologies and cloud platforms to deliver something.

Successful cloud companies are not longer about selling infrastructure, we're past that - the profit is now in transforming developer knowledge into products/services that can be bought with a click.

I don't agree with the premise of your comment about containers. I think most of the downsides you listed are misplaced.

First of all they make the user dumber. Instead of learning something new, you blindly "compose pull & up" your way. Easy, but it's dumbifier and that's not a good thing.

I'd argue, that actually using containers properly requires very solid Linux skills. If someone indeed blindly "compose pull & up" their stuff, this is no different than blind curl | sudo bash which is still very common. People are going to muddle through the installation copy pasting stuff no matter what. I don't see why containers and compose files would be any different than pipe to bash or random reddit comment with "step by step instructions". Look at any forum where end users aren't technically strong and you'll see the same (emulation forums, raspberry pi based stuff, home automation,..) - random shell scripts, rm -rf this ; chmod 777 that

Containers are just another piece of software that someone can and will run blindly. But I don't see why you'd single them out here.

Second, there is a dangerous trend where projects only release containers, and that's bad for freedom of choice

As a developer I can't agree here. The docker images (not "containers" to be precise) are not there replacing deb packages. They are there because it's easy to provide image. It's much harder to release a set of debs, rpms and whatnot for distribution the developer isn't even using. The other options wouldn't even be there in the first place, because there's only so many hours in a day and my open source work is not paying my bills most of the time. (patches and continued maintenance is of course welcome) So the alternative would be just the source code, which you still get. No one is limiting your options there. If anything the Dockerfile at least shows exactly how you can build the software yourself even without using docker. It's just bash script with extra isolation.

I am aware that you can download an image and extract the files inside, that's more an hack than a solution.

Yeah please don't do that. It's probably not a good idea. Just build the binary or whatever you're trying to use yourself. The binaries in image often depend on libraries inside said image which can be different from your system.

Third, with containers you are forced to use whatever deployment the devs have chosen for you. Maybe I don't want 10 postgres instances one for each service, or maybe I already have my nginx reverse proxy or so.

It might be easier (effort-wise) but you're certainly not forced. At the very least you can clone the repo and just edit the Dockerfile to your liking. With compose file it's the same story, just edit the thing. Or don't use it at all. I frequently use compose file just for reference/documentation and run software as a set of systemd units in Nix. You do you. You don't have to follow a path that someone paved if you don't like the destination. Remember that it's often someone's free time that paid for this path, they are not obliged to provide perfect solution for you. They are not taking anything away from you by providing solution that someone else can use.