Cool attitude. In my experience, most docker/docker-compose setups will work transparently with podman/podman-compose. If you want to tighten security, lock down ressource access, run rootless (daemon and inside the container), integrate with SELinux, then you might need to put in extra-work, just like you would if you used docker.
The whole point of docker/compose is you don’t have to do all those things to get started.
Why re-invent the wheel? They aren’t.
This whole conversation is about re-inventing the wheel called docker-compose with quadlet. Or whatever podman will come up with next as a “drop-in” replacement.
Quadlets were never meant as a drop-in replacement. The docker-compose tool works just fine on top of podman though. I personally use it to setup Jellyfin and Nextcloud.
That’s why I used double quotes around the word drop-in (supposed to be a play on the whole preposition of podman being touted as a drop-in replacement to docker).
Even so, what is really the use of Quadlets if docker-compose works just fine? Is it supposed to be just a backup alternative to compose just incase something catastrophic were to ever happen to docker-compose? Why create two ways to do one thing? Seems rather confusing and misplaced.
I prefer the simplicity of docker-compose on top of podman myself for my self-hosting needs, but I imagine systemd integration to be advantageous in many ways. You can have your containers activated by a socket. You can configure your containers so that they depend on certain system services being up or available, giving you more fine grained control over your start up process. That’s just off-the-top of my head as I have very limited knowledge of this aspect of podman, but I don’t think it’s meant as a backup. It just provides a more flexible solution for certain deployment scenarios, in exchange for more configuration complexity of course.