Can I make use of other containers like debian or arch

You can. Running

podman run --rm -it docker.io/library/debian

will get you a Debian container, and

 podman run --rm -it docker.io/library/archlinux

will get you an Arch Linux container, and so on.

Podman supports OCI images so anything from hub.docker.com or quay.io should work. For many distributions there are “official” images that are supported and usually also maintained by the upstream project.

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