Indeed, everyone's free to do what they want, that's the beauty of open source.
I have zero issues with people vibe coding alternative Homebrew frontends, it's good for the ecosystem for there to be more experimentation.
What I take objection to is when one or more of these happen:
- incorrect compatibility claims are made (e.g. if you're not running Ruby, no post-install blocks in formulae are gonna work)
- synthetic benchmarks are used to demonstrate speed (e.g. running `brew reinstall openssl` in a loop is not a terribly representative case, instead a e.g. cold `brew upgrade` of >10 packages would be). to be clear, I'm sure most of these projects are faster than Homebrew in fair benchmarks too!
- incorrect claims about why Homebrew is slow are made (e.g. "we do concurrent downloads and Homebrew doesn't": true a year ago, not true since 5.0.0 in November 2025)
- it's pitched as a "replacement for Homebrew" rather than "an alternative frontend for Homebrew" when it's entirely reliant on our infrastructure, maintainers, update process, API, etc.
Even on the above: of course people are free to do whatever they want! It's just at least some of the above hinders rather than helps the ecosystem and makes it harder rather than easier for us as a wider open source ecosystem to solve the problem "Homebrew is slow" (which, to be clear, it is in many cases).
Thank you for the answer now it made more clearer, at least for me, on what you meant.
And to be fair, when I was at 4.x version, 90% of the time I was in the happy path, my "being slow" issue was when download speeds got really bad, sometimes caused by my ISP, so my end.
As others mentioned, homebrew is a great piece of software, thank you, not only you but everyone who maintains it.
Thanks for all the hard work. I think brew is what makes the Mac the best “unix” machine choice as far as being stable and not having to take up maintaining my OS as a multi-hour per week hobby. I have been using it daily for three years and have never had any problems.
While I have some vague recollection of homebrew feeling slow in the past I don't know when - I want to say well before Nov 2025. And recently absolutely no such feeling, and great features like auto update handling, etc just working. It's really good stuff.
Python has powered Linux package management to reasonable result for a long time, Python itself is ironic for having tricky platform constraints that ended up being best solved with uv's excellent rust solver. For homebrew I would personally not stress over a Rust frontend - but if it keeps some of the FUD out then maybe it's worth it!
> People are free and probably do this because it is slow. Alternatives often are not a bad thing.
Alternatives are always good but IMO brew is just not something I interact with all that much and to me it's "good enough". It works and does what I expect, although to be fair maybe I'm on the happy path <shrug>.
Good to know! I was doing this with a hacky one-liner but wasn't aware of this flag. I think the sequential build/install process is the agonizing bit though.
I don't see where he said it's a bad thing, or even implied it. As I see it, he did imply that superlatives like THE FASTEST PACKAGE MANAGER aren't worth much in this environment.
Yeah, tbh homebrew is slow as fuck. It literally took 30 minutes to install aws cli on my 2020 mbp. I will happily flock to every new version that's faster.
> There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks.
People are free and probably do this because it is slow. Alternatives often are not a bad thing.