[microtonal]

it's universally _easier_ to install in Linux than it is in OSX*

Unless the package is not in the repositories or you want to have an instance with some different flags. One of the really nice things of Homebrew is that besides being a package manager, it is a great /usr/local manager.

For instance, installing something that is not in Homebrew is as simple as setting the prefix to /usr/local/Cellar/whatever/version and then running brew link whatever and it puts symbolic links in /usr/local. Want to make it 'invisible'? Just do a brew unlink whatever

It's also much easier to maintain your own Homebrew repos (taps) than e.g. maintaining an Ubuntu PPA.

[joshvm]

Or it simply has a name you don't expect. A lot of the problems I had in Linux, before I got used to it, was simply not knowing what I needed to install.

I'm used to being able to do, 'brew install foo' and not needing to worry if I needed libfoo, libfoo-dev, libfoo3-dev or just plain foo.

[microtonal]

  apt-cache search foo

Done :). But I see your point. There's usually the library, the development headers plus static link library, and possibly some command line tools.

And usually the headers aren't that big (with the notable exception of template-heavy C++), so it's much simpler installing everything.

But such splitting primarily occurs in the Debian family.