We recently branched Podman 4.8 for a soon to be release. But the big news is our main branch is now 5.0.0-dev. For our users, this means a new major version of Podman has begun its genesis.

What can users expect?

We plan to begin releases of Podman 5.0.0 in early 2024. At this point, Podman 5 will focus largely on:

• stabilizing and simplifying Podman machine
• deprecating old technologies,
• switching new technologies to the default
• improving how Podman deals with its configuration files

What about the 4.x branch?

We do intend to release bug fixes on 4.8 as needed and also have a 4.9 planned at about the same time at 5.0 is released. As far as which release will be in what distribution, we leave that to our partners. For Fedora, we do anticipate that some version of Podman 5 will be shipped in Fedora 41.