If loginctl enable-linger requires a reboot is not up to us, this is a systemd feature. What I do not understand here is why podman is failing with XDG_RUNTIME_DIR problem. In the issue description you say uid 1002 but the errors shows 1006. Can you try this with podman 3.4 or podm...
/kind bug Description When creating a new user and enabling linger the following error will be presented. ERRO[0000] XDG_RUNTIME_DIR directory "/run/user/<UID>" is not owned by the current user Most research links this to environment lea...