I don’t know how much hackery and fuckery there is with docker specifically. The majority of what docker does was already present in the Linux kernel namespaces, cgroups etc. Docker just made it easier to build and ship the isolated environments between systems.

I assume portainer communicates via the docker socket? If so, couldn’t you just point portainer to the podman socket?

Meh, it’s just software

I’m shocked. Shocked! Well not that shocked.