[selfsimilar]

About 11 years ago I moved over to then OS X and Homebrew was very new compared to MacPorts at the time. I started with the more established MacPorts, but quickly became frustrated with how many broken and outdated packages were hosted on MacPorts. So I moved over to Homebrew and haven't looked back.

This is not to say that Homebrew is perfect; there's lots of big and little things I'd change. But I'd argue that at least at the inflection point of its introduction, Homebrew definitely solved a problem I was having with its competition. Timing helped for sure, but in my experience it won on technical merits.

[kstrauser]

I'm in that same boat. Homebrew irks some people, but for me it's always just worked to the point that I just don't have to think about it, ever. That's what I really want from a package manager: to be able to forget that it's there and start taking it for granted.