What was different? I learned podman first because that’s what my work wanted to use. I feel like 99% of the time I can just alias docker=podman and everything just works the same way you would expect.
Obviously podman has pods instead of docker compose, but you can get docker compose working for podman if you prefer to do it that way.
The one thing that I feel is extremely wonky about podman is UIDs in rootless containers. But when I want to figure out what the UID a user has outside the container, I just mount an empty volume that has permissions 777, touch a file, then check the UID of that file outside the container.