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by rollcat 395 days ago
I feel you. I could write an essay about Homebrew, instead I'll list the other alternatives. There's pkgsrc[1], MacPorts[2], and Nix[3]. In my experience, none of these are as comprehensive, and each comes with its own quirks. Worth a try, might work for you.

[1]: https://www.pkgsrc.org/, https://pkgsrc.smartos.org/install-on-macos/

[2]: https://www.macports.org/

[3]: https://nixos.org/download/

1 comments

It’s a bit surprising to hear nix described as “not as comprehensive”, considering they’ve basically built a whole OS around it, but I’m curious about your take on this specifically.
Mostly the prebuilt binary packages, "casks". Out of 13 casks I currently have installed, only 6 are in nixpkgs. Some are built for Linux (e.g. Ungoogled Chromium), but not for Mac.

I've also cherry-picked a couple non-cask packages that I would dearly miss: dark-notify, ddcctl, displayplacer, the kinda stuff you need to "fix" macOS.