I Switched From Docker to Podman and It Fixed Problems I Didn't Know I Had
How-To Geek, Thursday, October 8th, 2026
A self-hoster explains switching to Podman for its rootless, daemonless design, which avoids Docker's habit of bypassing UFW rules.
How-To Geek explains why the author replaced Docker with Podman, a free and open source container engine that runs OCI images from Docker Hub with near-identical commands.
Podman has no root daemon, so containers run under the user who started them, and 'pods' launch groups of containers together.
The biggest benefit is security, since Docker's root daemon writes its own iptables rules ahead of UFW so ports stay open even after 'ufw deny,' while rootless Podman normally can't edit firewall rules.