I use nftables to set my firewall rules. I typically manually configure the rules myself. Recently, I just happened to dump the ruleset, and, much to my surprise, my config was gone, and it was replaced with an enourmous amount of extremely cryptic firewall rules. After a quick examination of the rules, I found that it was Docker that had modified them. And after some brief research, I found a number of open issues, just like this one, of people complaining about this behaviour. I think it’s an enourmous security risk to have Docker silently do this by default.
I have heard that Podman doesn’t suffer from this issue, as it is daemonless. If that is true, I will certainly be switching from Docker to Podman.
Your containers show up in Cockpit under the “Podman containers” section and you can view logs, type commands into their consoles, etc. You can even start up containers, manage images, etc.
I have not done this personally, but I would assume you need to create a bridge device in Network Manager or via Cockpit and then tell your VM to use that. Keep in mind, bridge devices only work over Ethernet.