You can start learning docker, podman isn't that different at least a fundamental level.  Once you understand the basics of how containers work it should be a lot easier to learn the quirks of other systems like podman.

It depends on your distro. If you use a Debian-based distro, I've found the packages in the repos are lagging behind too much. Meaning no Podman v4 available, unless you install from source or mess with mixing Testing packages.

My recommendation is to maybe learn the basics with Docker or rootful Podman, then as soon as possible try to shift to rootless Podman. To ease the initial learning, you can do `alias docker=podman`. While there are things where this is not really functional, I doubt you'll run into any issues initially, as they are mostly in things that are not really a good fit to containers anyway. It usually means the application needs some privilege that you should really consider hard giving, especially for 3rd party images.

Docker daemon runs as root on the host, hence the containers run as root. Rootless Docker is not worth the hassle, compared to how simple rootless containers are with Podman. Most of the things people self-host really don't need any special privilege

If you are starting out on Debian/Ubuntu, then use docker.

If you are already on Fedora/CentOS/Alma/Rocky then you may as well use podman.

I'm currently on Ubuntu and using docker but starting to test CentOS Stream and podman.

What kind of debugging precisely you cannot fix? Except for things that rely on docker.socket, podman should be pretty much a drop-in replacement for docker. Including any commands relevant to debugging.

10 days ago, I got the whole self hosting. I know that podman is the future but all the tutorials online for setting up self hosting apps are based on docker. I know that podman is compatible with docker images but there’s a lot of debugging involved which I can’t fix. Should I stick to docker for now?

New to cloud computing world. Should I leave docker or podman?