[tristor]

> But Homebrew wasn't (and isn't) better than MacPorts, either.

Hard disagree. Maybe that situation has improved for MacPorts, but when I made a decision to move from a Thinkpad running FreeBSD to a MBP for work, I gravitated immediately towards MacPorts and found it to be horrendously broken and significantly less friendly than using Ports on FreeBSD. I was expecting a similar UX, and found something that had the trappings of Ports with none of the underlying maintenance that makes it actually work.

Then someone recommended Homebrew. I tried it, and it worked perfectly the first time. I actually kept both on my system for awhile and tried to make MacPorts work, but eventually over the years I gave up on that and I've been a Homebrew user now for more than 5 years. Homebrew is strictly better in the most important factor: It actually works.