question, why would you leave docker for podman?
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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Podman doesn't need a daemon running as root. If a container gets compromised and gets control of the container process, they won't have root access outside of the container.
I am currently trying to transition from docker-compose to podman-compose before trying out podman quadlets eventually.
Just FYI and not related to your problem, you can run docker-compose with podman engine. You don't need docker engine installed for this. If podman-compose is set up properly, this is what it does for you anyway. If not, it falls back to an incomplete Python hack. Might as well cut out the middle-man.
systemctl --user enable --now podman
DOCKER_HOST=unix://${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/podman/podman.sock docker-compose up
I usually set :Z at the end of volume mounts and it fixes the permission issues. Now that I think about it, all my Quadlets are using this option.
Which system are you using? SELinux/AppArmot active? Can you share your compose? There are manyavariables at play here.
Other than that: Setting UID/GID via environmental variable is usually wrong, mostly from a design perspective of the container. There is a user directive during build as well as during deploy to use for that.
From a quick look at the docker file it does look like the user you use to run linkding needs to be in the root group.
BUT rootless podman maps the root user (usually to your user ID) to so the root user inside the container has not the same ID as the one outside. So I would suggest setting the permissions of the volume to your user for now.
Another way to figure out which user to use: just start a new/clean instance of the service and look at the new volumes.
I tried to use named volumes and now everything works fine, weird.
I think Mora is on the ball but we'd need their questions answered to know.
One possibility is that you have SELinux enabled. Check by sudo getenforce. The podman manpage explains a bit about labels and shares for mounts. Read up on :z and :Z and see if appending either to the volumes in your compose file unlocks it.
If running rootless, your host user also obviously needs be able to access it.
@theorangeninja Rootless podman container and owner of created files - always a mystery.
Maybe, the part belonging to "Using volumes" could help:
https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorials/rootless/_tutorial.md
If the container process is running with another UID than 0 (root), created files on the host belongs to another UID, calculated based on settings from /etc/suduid.
You should have a look into --userns for mapping of UIDs between container and host:
https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-run.1.html
For PostgreSQL I'm using keep-id:uid=999,gid=999.
I went on and tried something else and when using named volumes (the dev uses bind mounts in his compose file) everything works without errors.