From a user point of view, podman is mostly identical to docker. Like 98% of the time you can just replace ‘docker’ with ‘podman’ and it works. How they work under the hood is very different, though. Podman is designed around running rootless and daemonless. But if you don’t care about those things, use docker. Docker supports rootless as well now anyway, but you need to set it up manually. The biggest difference I have found is that podman doesn’t support docker-compose, which is extremely popular. Lemmy uses it, for example. There’s an additional couple of packages you can install that add support for docker-compose, but then podman uses a daemon, which defeats one of the purposes of using podman in the first place.

My workaround that I use for btrfs and systemd files is to have a folder in /etc with all my service files, then I soft link them to my service’s directory. This is just for organization purposes, as a backup wouldn’t include the data of the systemd file, just the link to it.