I use kubernetes for pushing stuff to AWS EKS, and it is great. The problem I found with minikube and other Kubernetes based "alternatives" to Docker Desktop (including podman) is that they are not compatible with Docker Compose. There are a * a lot * of "solved problems" via docker-compose.yml files, and all of my past companies have used it. I've tried some docker-compose to k8s migration tools, but the amount of crap files they generate was not feasible for me.
Nerdctl[1] (for containerd) works fine with docker-compose.yml for my purposes (which are not much). The only issue I encountered was with environment variable substitution not working the same as docker-compose, but I didn't look hard for a solution and edited my compose file
Helm charts are roughly the k8s equivalent of docker compose. Might be a few years before they’re as widespread but a lot of common things you’d want to host are largely “solved” already.
