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by mschuster91 3782 days ago
Homebrew sucks on multi-user systems (especially if the Mac in question has previously been single-user) or after the Mac changes its owner/becomes a shared one (company laptop).

Macports handles this usecase far, far better. Give your users sudo rights and be done. Only thing it desperately lacks is allowing third-party additional repositories like Debian's apt does.

3 comments

You can have additional MacPorts repositories, though I'm sure they're not nearly as configurable as in APT. See, for example, https://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.local-reposit.... Instead of local, the repository you add could be remote. That said, I don't believe I've ever seen a third-party MacPorts repository in the wild.
It's not the default thing to do, but I've found that installing Homebrew under your home directory to work well. Everything's owned by that user, and there are no issues with shared machines (since other users don't see it at all). The downside is that casks (i.e. pre-built installers) might still end up installing things outside, but that would have been the same without Homebrew existing in the first place.
It always bugs me when people don't wipe laptops before handing them off.
In a company environment with shared machines?