[astrange]

The interesting thing about Homebrew is that there were perfectly good systems before it that were more stable and better designed (Fink and Macports, neither of which install to /usr/local) and apparently the only reason people switched to Homebrew is that it was "cool" because it was written in Ruby.

[hollerith]

When I switched to MacOS (about 11 years ago) I tried Macports first, but ended up with Homebrew because Macports required me to learn more things than Homebrew required of me before I could successfully install the 10 or so small command-line packages I wanted to install. (At that time, Fink was lacking a maintainer IIRC.)

Note that I didn't want to take the time to try to determine which one had the better design and engineering.

(I didn't not know or want to learn Ruby when I made the decision.)

[WesolyKubeczek]

Also, it displays a cool beer emoji when you install a package. And colors! Fancy colors and progress bars. And no sudo, except when needed of course.

And then goes the Ruby factor, of course.

It ticks all the important dopamine checkboxes of a MacBook-wielding, Starbucks-resident hipster type who has just purchased an .io domain and is ready to code their world-changing app.

Took me a while to figure out how to disable this stuff.