With the Docker enterprise licensing stuff last year, I had to cease use of Docker Desktop at work which has been really annoying. As a non-dev who dabbles and roles their own tools it means my primary use case of firing up a DB really quickly and easily when needed is gone.

I've been eyeing podman but the additional friction scares me off from jumping in. Has anyone else not doing full-time dev found it (or similar) a simple enough replacement?

Here's an article about it: How Colima is a good alternative to Docker Desktop ( https://kumojin.com/en/colima-alternative-docker-desktop/ )

I'm using Colima together with DDEV ( https://ddev.com ) to create and run PHP projects (webserver + db) in containers. Clean, very easy to use, and fast.