EDIT: For some context, I recently gave podman another go. I have a few services on my homelab server set up in docker containers, so I tried migrating to podman.
After the second major bug (open issue on github) I encountered looked like it would require completely dropping using compose files to work around, I gave up and went back to docker.
I like the idea of podman, but it’s just not stable. I’ll try again in a year or so.
As a bonus, docker’s CLI is significantly nicer.


Can’t confirm. I have two VMs with an identical image (about 200 MB).
Docker: Pulling the image takes about 10 seconds and needs about 200 MB diskspace.
Podman: Pulling the image takes about 15 minutes and needs about 110 GB diskspace.
Docker: Commands like “docker ps”, “docker stop” etc. run in a few seconds.
Podman: Commands like “podman ps”, “podman stop” etc. take at least one minute.
Company confirmed that it is lighter and faster with multiple benchmark at the time of migration. Your case sounds like extreme misconfiguration.
I did not configure anything, I just installed it from the debian repository.
If this is on Debian 12 I think the issue is that the default storage backend is VFS rather than Overlay, which burnt me as well as it is REALLY inefficient. Look up how to find out what you’re using and change it if that’s it. After doing that it’s been really good for me :)
I am on Debian 13, but the storage might be the issue.
Something is super wrong in your setup or some weird Podman bug on your side. Works flawlessly and quickly on my machine, no such issues.
And on most people’s machines too. So, this must either be an exotic Podman bug, or something not right with your setup. Not many options there, but I hope you’ll find out what’s wrong.
I’m not op. I just like to use the meme when I see the meme.
Lol
How exactly is it using four orders of magnitude more space? Did you look what the files?
It is the ~/.local/share/containers folder.
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