I love podman and use it extensively, but am less sure how useful the machine functionality will be (to me). I use KVM (with virt-manager) extensively, and I could see how treating VMs as ephemeral like containers might be nice for some workflows, but for me I want my VMs to be stateful as they are now. Anything I want container workflow for I just use containers. I don't do any Windows though, all linux.
I might actually find machines useful for testing some old wordpress instances that I'd love to be able to iterate on with a full systemd and everything on the same machine (because that mirrors how prod is set up). I might dig into this use case a little deeper.
Anyone have context on why this announcement from 2025 is shared? Seems like it's delayed and have not been released yet?
https://blog.podman.io/2026/05/podman-6-release-delayed/
The announcement is from May 4, 2026 ?
I think OP meant the subject link. The 2026 link they shared was as evidence of the delay.
I love podman and use it extensively, but am less sure how useful the machine functionality will be (to me). I use KVM (with virt-manager) extensively, and I could see how treating VMs as ephemeral like containers might be nice for some workflows, but for me I want my VMs to be stateful as they are now. Anything I want container workflow for I just use containers. I don't do any Windows though, all linux.
I might actually find machines useful for testing some old wordpress instances that I'd love to be able to iterate on with a full systemd and everything on the same machine (because that mirrors how prod is set up). I might dig into this use case a little deeper.
What are some things people would use this for?
I believe this is primarily for running Podman on macOS and Windows, where you need to run everything through a VM for anything to really work.