[mikelevins]

You don't absolutely have to use brew, but there's a sort of relentless soft pressure to use it because it's more or less the de facto standard package manager for macOS and has such a large collection of packages.

I rather dislike it, and I periodically purge it from my system. So far I've always ended up reluctantly adding it back because I was trying out some tool or other that was dramatically more of a pain to install without brew.

I can get by for a long time without it, but then I want to try out something that assumes brew, or whose dependencies assume brew, and it winds up back on my system again until I get vexed enough to remove it again.

[kergonath]

> it's more or less the de facto standard package manager for macOS and has such a large collection of packages

I definitely see the social pressure. That said, I’ve never needed to use it because I needed a package that was not on Macports. So far for my use no difference in the number of packages in the default repositories has been meaningful.

[mikelevins]

The thing that always makes me cave and install brew is I want to try some tool and its default install assumes brew.

Now, I'll bet in close to 100% of cases I could get things to work with stuff from MacPorts instead, but I've accumulated thirty years worth of scars that incline me to want to stick as closely as possible to the defaults when trying something new.

So I end up going back to brew, even though I don't much like it.