Podman is not yet ready for mainstream, in my experience

My experience varies wildly from yours, so please don’t take this bit as gospel.

Have yet to find a container that doesn’t work perfectly well in podman. The options may not be the same. Most issues I’ve found with running containers boil down to things that would be equally a problem in docker. A sample:

• “rootless” containers are hard to configure. It can almost always be fixed with “–privileged” or some combination of permission flags. This would be equally true for docker; the only meaningful difference is podman tries to push everything into rootless. You don’t have to.
• network filesystems cause headaches, especially smbfs + sqlite app. I’ve had to use NFS or ext4 inside a network-mounted image for some apps. This problem is identical for docker.
• container networking–for specific cases–needs to managed carefully. These cases are identical for docker.

And that’s it. I generally run things once from the podman command line, then use podlet to create a quadlet out of that configuration, something you can’t do with docker. If you are having any trouble with running containers under podman, try the --privileged shortcut, see that it works, and then double back if you think you really need rootless.

Thanks! I’ll try this and report back. This sounds like a version of (#1) - merge accounts.

Gluetun is kind of a wrapper around wireguard or openvpn, that greatly simplifies setup and configurability.

I have a VM that runs wireguard to airvpn, in a container made of gluetun. Then you share that container’s network with a qbittorrent container (or pick your torrent) and an nzbget container (or pick your nzb downloader). Tada, your downloaders are VPN’d forever.

Thanks! Yeah, figuring out how to get gluetun working properly with a vpn and downloaders was a chore and a half. Glad I got that sorted, now I feel pretty confident I can punch a mobile app through into the network pretty easily.

So in the, let’s say, top one-third tier of the options, something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-SER5-Mini-PC-Desktop-Computer/dp/B0C286SR8V/ref=pd_ci_mcx_pspc_dp_d_2_i_1?pd_rd_i=B0C286SR8V

Or, similarly, this, which is my current mediaserver: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C1X191NR/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1

I went with the second one–more ram. Anecdotally, some people think beelink is more reliable but this is not a universal opinion, and my experience has been that the minisforum is extremely reliable.

If you search similar you can find options both up and down depending on your actual budget. You probably don’t want to do components on these things, apart from maybe putting in a bigger m.2 nvme.

Mine is running on one of these https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYZC4SMW which exceeds your specs by quite a bit. They have substantially cheaper models closer to your range, I’ll bet you can find something.

I haven’t had mine for very long but so far it’s been A+.

Oof. Devs, don’t talk to customers or users like this. Ever. You have no idea what’s actually going on at the other end of the conversation. “Sorry we couldn’t help you,” is all this person needed to say, but now a whole bunch of people are going to stay the hell away from OST paid subs.