[nickbauman]

Homebrew barely works. I dread messing with it. It's not Homebrew's fault: with Macs the stars have to align to get things to work much of the time. I find that the origin OS for most of my libraries (Linux/Debian) is much more reliable than a Mac. I had some issues switching away from a mac at first, but I got over them.

[wyager]

> Homebrew barely works. I dread messing with it.

One of us must be smoking something. I've never had a more reliable/friendly package manager (among apt-get, pacman, macports, pkg_add, yum).

[tbarbugli]

Brew works great most of the times and it is indeed very human friendly. The problem sometimes arises when you need to install something a little bit more exotic than usual (eg. graph-tool was my last case) in that case lot of things can go wrong.

[aptwebapps]

Maybe the experience depends on what packages you install?

[microtonal]

It is hard to say, because the grandparent says that Homebrew barely works without providing any examples of the problems they have ran into.

[nickbauman]

Yeah as long as you're using what everyone else is using and stay "inside the lines" it's OK. But step off into special territory, you're better off on Linux.

[natch]

Wild guess: people who keep Xcode and its associated command line tools up to date have smooth experiences. Those who don't, do not.

[wyager]

Brew recently started refusing to install anything if your xcode is out of date, and forces you to wait for a "brew update" if it hasn't updated in 24 hours. It's actually hideously user-unfriendly, but it probably saves the devs a lot of stupid github issues.

[vetinari]

Unless you made the mistake of upgrading to Xcode 8 while staying with El Capitan and then wondering, why nothing works.

[natch]

What specifically doesn't work?

It's working for me but I would love to have an example of breakage to take to my IT as another reason they should allow the company machines to be updated.

[fredsir]

The only time I remember having a problem with Homebrew is in the summer where I'll run some beta version of the new macOS on a testing machine while trying to use Homebrew which does not support the beta. Other than that it never fails for me, and I install a boat load of tools through Homebrew. I even install as much of my GUI tools as possible using brew cask.

[michaelvoz]

Parallel universes with opposite realities: proven!

[yarou]

What's forcing you to use Homebrew? You could easily use pkgsrc or Nix.

[stephenr]

The problem absolutely is Homebrew.

[raarts]

It's better to substantiate allegations. Causes people to take you more seriously.

[stephenr]

Homebrew is a "package manager" that has worse dependency management than a ham sandwich and a community that reacts to criticism with "don't talk to us, you're being negative".