[clizzin]

Actually, package managers are core to most Linux distributions! That's been the case long before there was ever Homebrew for OS X. You should almost never have to manually install from source if you're installing anything relatively well-known.

If you're using Debian or Ubuntu, you should use the APT package manager. A good tutorial can be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet/Howto

If you're Fedora or Red Hat, you should use yum, which a tool for the RPM package manager. Here is a list of basic yum commands: http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumCommands

You can find more explanations/tutorials if you search using queries like "apt tutorial ubuntu" or "yum tutorial red hat." Hope you get acquainted quickly!

This might raise the question: Why make Homebrew work on Linux if other package managers exist already and work really well? I can think of a couple reasons: 1) fun experimentation, and 2) the fact that Homebrew formulas are Ruby code, which many people find more approachable to write than APT or RPM packages. My opinion is that it would be fun to see Homebrew on Linux, but it's not necessary given that existing package managers work very well, and many developers are willing to do the work of packaging for the rest of us.