[wwalexander]

Homebrew is a subpar choice on macOS; MacPorts is faster, has more packages, and is implemented more correctly than Brew.

Additionally, MacPorts was co-created by an engineer who also created the original FreeBSD Ports system, and thus hews much more closely to standard UNIX/BSD practices.

I’m not sure how and when Homebrew became the standard, but it is definitively worse.

[jwdunne]

I came to realise this too.

Using Homebrew and multiple users is excruciating and an eye opener on how system-level software should really be installed.

Homebrew insists on avoiding root privileges whilst also installing packages system-wide. That works fine and is invisible with one user but falls down hard otherwise.

Their documentation is incorrect too, saying that this is all fine because “we install in /usr/local/bin”. It’s not easy to change this.

The solution was to embrace MacPorts which correctly requires root privileges to install system-wide packages.

I haven’t looked back since. I haven’t missed brew or any software that’s available on brew alone.

[mekster]

Too bad when I want to install newer fancy tools on Linux, it's easier to unify the environment with Homebrew instead of using Homebrew only on Linux (which has a very weird quirk that it wants to install in /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew (or else it'll start compiling so many packages instead rolling binary packages) instead of /opt/homebrew like any sane decision would've been.)

I also don't understand Nix when it wants to make 30 users for build process and a few unintuitive decisions. Otherwise it's good that it works same on macOS and Linux.