Simplifying installation and use of Podman for non admin users on Windows

[l0rd]

Feature request description

There are different cases when podman requires elevated mode on Windows:

1. the installer copies files in C:/Program Files
2. the installer checks if WSL and HyperV are installed
3. on Hyper-V, every execution of podman machine init creates HKLM registry keys
4. on Hyper-V, every execution of podman machine start/stop/reset... requires the privileges to control a Hyper-V VM
5. the first execution of podman machine init installs Hyper-V or WSL if they are not installed yet

Suggest a potential solution

Here is a list of proposals to address or simplify the points above:

1. the installer should copy files under the current user %HOME%
2. the installer should not detect WSL and HyperV (machine init should be responsible for it and for consequential actions)
3. podman machine init should re-execute itself in elevated mode and create the HKLM reg key only once (next machine init will reuse the key)
4. current user has to be the administrator or part of the Hyper-V administrators. At first execution, if the condition isn't met, the podman machine command re-executes itself in elevated mode to add the user to the Hyper-V administrators group
5. podman machine init should re-execute itself in elevated mode and install the Windows component (this was the 4.x behavior that is currently broken)

Additional context

Related issues:

• #22101
• #22994
• #23000
• #23578
• #25037
• #25038
• #25523