Enterprise Linux
Roughly six months prior to a new major version of their Enterprise Linux distro, Red Hat decides on the versions of nearly all third-party software they plan to include, then nails them in place. This is the basis for their primary service offering, wherein they patch these static versions for the next ten-ish years without adding any new features, all in the name of stability and compatibility.
One of the few notable exceptions Red Hat makes to this policy is for Podman, being a first-party product. Every point release of RHEL has a good chance of including a new version of Podman, with new features. That doesn’t always happen, but consider this history:
| RHEL Version(s) |
Podman1 Version |
|---|---|
| 7.5 | 0.9.2 |
| 7.7 | 1.4.4 |
| 8.0/7.8 | 1.6.4 |
| 8.2 | 2.0.0 |
| 8.3 | 2.0.5 |
| 8.4 | 3.2.3 |
| 8.5 | 3.4.2 |
| 8.6/9.0 | 4.1.1 |
| 8.7/9.1 | 4.2.0 |
| 8.8/9.2 | 4.4.1 |
| 8.9/9.3 | 4.6.1 |
| 8.10/9.4 | 4.9.4 |
| 9.5 | 5.2.2 |
| 9.6/10.0 | 5.4.0 |
Were Red Hat to treat Podman the same as they do the bulk of the software they include with their distribution, they would have stuck with 1.6.4 clear through the end of the RHEL 8 lifetime, then 4.6.1 through the end of RHEL 9, requiring users to upgrade to RHEL 10 in order to get Podman 5.x.
Notice also that this trend continues even after the cutover point to new major versions of the OS. While you might have guessed that Podman would finally drop into a “stable” mode at 8.6 and 9.6 when the corresponding ${NEXT}.0 releases came out, the table above shows that this is not the case for RHEL 8 at least: it continued getting point release upgrades through its Full Support period.2 Although the 9.7 release has yet to occur as of this writing, the table above leads me to expect it to have the same version of Podman as in the coming RHEL 10.1.
Debian
Contrast the situation for Debian over the same time span:
| Debian Version |
Podman Version |
|---|---|
| 9 (Stretch) | none! |
| 10 (Buster) | none! |
| 11 (Bullseye) | 3.0.1 |
| 12 (Bookworm) | 4.3.1 |
| 13 (Trixie) | 5.4.2 |
You also see this in OSes based directly on Debian, such as the Raspberry Pi OS.
Ubuntu
At the Ubuntu Server LTS level, the situation is similar:
| Ubuntu LTS Version |
Podman Version |
|---|---|
| 18.04 (Bionic) | none! |
| 20.04 (Focal) | none! |
| 22.04 (Jammy) | 3.4.4 |
| 24.04 (Noble) | 4.9.3 |
We cannot expect to see Podman 5.x in the LTS line from Ubuntu until 26.04.3 Until then, their users will be missing out on major features like build farms, Pasta user-space networking, OCI artifacts, and greatly improved Quadlet support.
Atop this, the podman package, all of its add-ons, and many of its key dependencies are relegated to the community-maintained “universe” repository. That would be fine if your intent in choosing Ubuntu LTS was to get a community-maintained OS like Debian above, but if instead you sought commercial support, it will not be first-party in the case of Podman, as it is with RHEL. Ubuntu’s first-party alternative is LXD, but that is far from an apples-to-apples comparison.
If the community support factor does not bother you, then you may be willing to use one of the short-term releases to get a Podman release cadence closer to what you see in the Red Hat family of OSes.
License
This work is © 2025 by Warren Young and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- ^ In cases where Red Hat shipped multiple versions of Podman in parallel, this column gives the newest one only.
- ^ My reading of RHEL’s "Maintenance Support” policy is that the ride is finally over for new features in Podman under RHEL 8.
- ^ The only reason Debian is ”ahead” on this is that Trixie came out over a year after Ubuntu 24.04. The situation will swap with 26.04, by which point Debian 14 will likely be another year from release.