If your distro is relatively recent, enable podman.socket (available as system and user unit) and things should just work as they do with docker. You may have to set CONTAINER_HOST though, and the new Docker CLI has the concept of contexts where you need to point the CLI at the right socket, but confusingly using docker as a library does not automatically add contexts as functionality, so Tools like flyctl (from fly.io) and melange (chainguard's APK builder) may still need CONTAINER_HOST anyway...

can you please clarify, from technical perspective

> enable podman.socket (available as system and user unit)

Won't it make podman be daemon then if it'd be activated by socket?

Won't such a daemon be run as root then to be able to handle creation of networks/ports forwardings/multiple-users?

As I said, there's a user unit (systemctl --user status podman.socket) that will run rootless just like using the podman CLI without elevation.

at some point it's easier to just use docker

other tools prefering to use CONTAINER_HOST instead of docker contexts happens without podman too, because docker didn't build contexts into their go client library and it's instead all in the docker CLI.