Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but Podman docs say it supports "Debian 11 (Bullseye) repositories and later" - 11 is flagged as the next LTS version, with Debian 10 (Buster) LTS support ending June 30th this year.
So on the surface - if you're making the decision to try it now, at least - it doesn't seem that supporting Debian 10 is that big a deal. I guess if you've been on Debian 10 for ages & wanting to use Podman that could easily have been a dealbreaker though, but as someone looking to switch out from Docker it looks like it should be fine on the next Debians?
Podman version in Debian 12 main repos is 4.3.1 released in November 2022.
There's no official way to get more recent releases apart from building from source. The semi-official-don't-use-in-production Kubic OBS binary repo for podman and its dependencies had been deprecated in 2023.
Yeh, I guess I'm used to that in pretty much all software with Debian - you're almost never going to get the bleeding edge unless you're compiling from source.
I generally kind of see this as a good thing, in that you can assume (or at least, hope) you're getting some extra stability because of this, but it's just as often frustrating when you're missing some key feature that came out a couple years ago because the repo version is old.
So on the surface - if you're making the decision to try it now, at least - it doesn't seem that supporting Debian 10 is that big a deal. I guess if you've been on Debian 10 for ages & wanting to use Podman that could easily have been a dealbreaker though, but as someone looking to switch out from Docker it looks like it should be fine on the next Debians?