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3,000,000 downloads. Thank you

· 5 min read
Matt Demyttenaere
Matt Demyttenaere
Product Manager

Banner announcing 3 million downloads

Wooohooo!!​

We are extremely excited to share that Podman Desktop just crossed 3,000,000 downloads! This is a huge step for the project and we are incredibly thankful for how each of you has helped! This milestone belongs to you. You file issues, suggest features, build extensions, teach teammates, and nudge us to make the day-to-day better. Thank you for helping turn an idea into a tool people rely on.

To celebrate this milestone, and thank you, we built a small surprise: https://3m.podman-desktop.io

We are grateful for all the feedback we have been receiving, here is just a short collection:

  • “Lovely to have all containers in one tool. Thanks!” - anonymous user feedback
  • "Podman Desktop is a total win." - balancedchaos Reddit (r/podman)
  • “Great project! Small improvements each time make it strong long-term.” - anonymous user feedback
  • "The experience has been nice, and the ability to run containers under user without going root is definitely nice." - ajyotirmay Hacker News
  • “You are doing a great job! Thanks to you I always recommend podman whenever 'docker' comes out in conversations” - anonymous user feedback
  • “OMG this tool is amazing. Tutorial was great. Much easier than minikube.” - anonymous user feedback

We read every comment. Yes, even the spicy ones. That feedback shapes our roadmap and helps us focus on the work that makes the biggest difference.

Here are other noteworthy milestones we’ve reached in our quest to help developers work with containers and Kubernetes.

Podman Desktop is now an official CNCF Sandbox Project​

Last year, we proudly contributed Podman Desktop to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and we were accepted into the CNCF Sandbox on January 21, 2025. 🎉

This milestone highlights our commitment to building open, community-driven tools that empower developers to seamlessly work with containers and Kubernetes. Joining the CNCF Sandbox is just the beginning. Reaching this 3 million downloads milestone shows the need to build a vibrant cloud‑native ecosystem and collaborate with the community to take Podman Desktop even further.

Highlights from the past year​

  • Smoother Kubernetes workflows: Easier context and namespace switching, a powerful dashboard for your cluster, and less jumping to the terminal when you want to apply YAML or peek at events and logs.
  • Better Docker compatibility: Clearer setup and diagnostics, improved socket handling, and fewer surprises when you bridge Docker and Podman workflows.
  • Everyday quality of life: Bulk actions for containers, better notifications, clearer status in the UI, and lots of fit and finish fixes that make everything feel calmer.
  • AI on your laptop, without drama: Podman AI Lab is easier to set up, with a curated model catalog, simple playgrounds, and an OpenAI-compatible API you can call from your apps.
  • Extensions, everywhere: More community-built extensions, plus tooling that makes it easier to develop and test your own. If you are extending Podman Desktop for your team, thank you. You are shaping where we take the platform.

Enterprise adoption of Podman Desktop​

In recent months, we’ve seen more and more enterprises adopting Podman Desktop and making it part of critical developer workflows. To highlight this, we wanted to share a recent note we received:

In 2023, our company studied the possible solutions to run containers on our engineers’ laptop in the most efficient way. We judged that our best bet was to migrate our thousands of engineers to Podman Desktop. That was a brave move but we believed Podman Desktop was the most promising solution. We did not know how quickly it would become the best solution of all and how right that decision would be!

We migrated most engineers in 2023 and did the last mile at the beginning of 2024. Podman Desktop evolved at an insane pace. It improved release after release. And it still does. It quickly became a rock solid solution with more and more useful features to discover every month!

On top of that, Podman Desktop is a Community solution which allows us to have a very healthy relationship with the contributors of the project.

I am happy to hear that Podman Desktop reached 3M downloads. This means more and more people realise how good this software is. Thank you Podman Desktop. Special thanks to all the project’s contributors!

Fabrice Pipart, Amadeus

New here? Grab the latest build​

From all of us on the Podman Desktop team, thank you for trusting us with your workflow and for helping us get better with every release. If you haven't tried Podman Desktop in a while, grab the latest build and let us know what you think. If you are already a daily user, we would love to hear what is working and what is not, so we can make the next million downloads even more useful.