[nishs]

I moved from Homebrew to MacPorts on a local, personal-use Intel Mac.

I chose Homebrew some years ago when I was not as experienced a programmer, because it was more popular than MacPorts. When I revisited the choice last year, I chose MacPorts.

On Homebrew:

* It has a Frankenstein permissions model; for example "brew install" writes files into /usr/local/* with your regular user account as the owner of the files.

* The permissions model means that Homebrew-managed parts of the system become a single user system, as far as I know. Multiple user accounts on the same Mac can't easily use Homebrew, as far as I know, and I dislike software with such design choices.

* Noisy messages and undesired colors in the command line output.

These issues are absent in MacPorts. Overall, MacPorts appears more mature and more Unix-like than Homebrew.

The cons of the move are that not all the packages I want are available in MacPorts. However I have sufficient experience now to package crucial missing ones into MacPorts.

[Terretta]

> for example "brew install" writes files into /usr/local/

I think it's /opt/homebrew on M1.

https://docs.brew.sh/FAQ#why-should-i-install-homebrew-in-th...

> permissions model means that Homebrew-managed parts of the system become a single user system, as far as I know. Multiple user accounts on the same Mac can't easily use Homebrew

The single user thing is problematic in a corp env where you may have a mgmt admin user and a non-admin dev user.

Long story short, temporarily have the dev user be an admin, install brew, drop the admin priv. That works for cli tools (which is actually great), but may not work for /Applications unless you change its ownership. Used to be OSX effectively (not literally) merged ~/Applications and /Applications, but now in MacOS the security sandboxing and entitlements don't like that.