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.
For sure, that’s why I asked what you meant by “clean”.
Ultimately, I’m a podman user, not a podman developer. So the interface and user experience matter a lot more to me than the internal architecture. Though architectural decisions to tend to affect the trajectory of a project as a whole, docker compose still seems to be holding up just fine.
I agree that ergonomics are also important, but for me not the top priority for me. For Podman, I like the way I can use Quadlet to quickly deploy and run containerized stuff.
However I really like it for building and running my own app stack pods. The combination of Quadlet and SystemD instance aliases is very powerful. I use this to drive all kinds of configuration automation.