[yakkers]

I've personally had very good experiences switching back from Homebrew to MacPorts. Wouldn't go back to Homebrew.

I find it much faster now, which is quite funny to me because back when Homebrew was new (and a lot less opinionated) it was much faster than MacPorts, especially with the bottles (binary packages) feature.

Today, MacPorts has binary packages, doesn't randomly force incredibly slow updates when I just want to quickly install something or run a package search, has entirely opt-in telemetry through installing a package (mpstats) and still lets me customise packages (through the variants system, which is more powerful than the with --with-feature system Homebrew seems to have abandoned).

The only pain point I've found is upgrading to new macOS releases, though I've often found just reinstalling MacPorts itself will get me going again in a pinch without having to take inventory of my installed ports and reinstall everything from scratch.

[kergonath]

> I've personally had very good experiences switching back from Homebrew to MacPorts. Wouldn't go back to Homebrew.

I have been much happier with Macports than with Homebrew (which I try every other year to see if it’s improved).

> The only pain point I've found is upgrading to new macOS releases, though I've often found just reinstalling MacPorts itself will get me going again in a pinch without having to take inventory of my installed ports and reinstall everything from scratch.

I used to use the commands suggested on the Macports website (save the list of installed packages to a file; update OS; install Macports; re-install ports). But since a couple of upgrades I have decided to use this as an opportunity to get rid of ports I don’t actually need.

[SavantIdiot]

Macports made my life hard three times I upgraded OSes from having to migrate Macports versions, just leaving broken files in /usr/local/*. The worst instance was Mavericks, when it suddenly said i had no ports, after 10 years on the same image. It did something similar during the Monterey update. I'm now 100% brew but still have broken artefacts from MacPorts littering my system. I'm also still using the same image from 2012, moved to new machines with TimeMachine, so that could be it, but I'm damned stubborn.

[Isthatablackgsd]

Perhaps it would be great opportunity for you to clean install macOS to start anew and start fresh from there without worrying about lingering old files in the system.

[SavantIdiot]

I know, I know.

I tried to do a clean install on my 2012 MBP to get a feel for what would break. Unfortunately the 2012 is out of service and Big Sur kept powering down randomly. It runs Ubuntu 20.04 just fine tho.

I think OSes shouldn't atrophy. So I'm super-testing TimeMachine.

[pxc]

Homebrew packages break on major macOS upgrades, too. It's not up to the package managers what Apple does or doesn't rip out on a given release

[dehrmann]

I also switched back after one too many issues with brew file ownership and permissions.