Podman Desktop’s default setup provisions a Fedora CoreOS virtual machine, which is immutable/read-only by design. This prevents installing VM-level packages (dnf, system tools, debuggers, etc.) and makes system customization difficult.
This guide uses Lima (limactl) with the official Podman template, which provisions a mutable Fedora Cloud VM that:
- Is natively supported by Podman Desktop
- Runs Podman as the container engine