Honestly don’t know why this is being downvoted. Swarm is officially being deprecated by Docker. There aren’t any current alternatives to k8s being proposed.

I second this. Even if swarm isn't officially deprecated my time with had proven that swarm was abandoned for k8s around 2016/2018. Long standing issues have been around for years.

Even trivial things like deploying only a single service from a stack file that contains multiple services isn't possible (even though docker compose has no problems with it).

The current recommended method to restart a service is to set it's scale to 0 then back to whatever number it was previously (because you remember it right?)

I thought it would be as good/polished as docker compose but boy was I wrong.

How about flynn [0] and nomad [1]? Both have been described as easier alternatives to k8s. There's also k3s [2] that caught my attention.

[0]: http://flynn.io [1]: https://www.nomadproject.io [2]: http://k3s.io

Thank you so much I'll check those out!