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I would also consider myself to be a power user. However, one huge annoying problem I've encountered is sharing homebrew between multiple users. It seems like i

• Brian_K_White 6y ago
  The homebrew developers (of the homebrew framework itself not all the random app maintainers) have been "doing it wrong since day one. It is utterly and unforgivably wrong to install system-wide binaries owned by a normal user outside of the users own home dir. That's what they were doing for years until fairly recently when Apple had to simply change the os to break their install, forcing brew to change it, finally, against their will. Macports did it right, but "brew ..." is just a cooler catchier name. It litterally comes down to that. The more fun name. When someone is new and confused and overwhelmed, a slight difference like that, or the design of the website, or the charisma of the people talking on forum posts, is the tipping factor in which of the 11 possible things they try. And as long as the first thing they tried worked, they keep doing it and quickly gain a rewarding feeling of accomplishment and confidense doing that thing. At that point this is their home and their comfort. They aren't bothering with anything else when it doesn't seem to be any different. They conclude they chose wisely the first time (which is a good feeling that anyone can always simply decide to reward themself with, ie confirmation bias). So, no one should have ever used homebrew. Homebrew "won" anyway, but not by being the better-architected more technically correct system with wiser engineers. I forgive all the users for not realizing that the directions they are terrible and broken. There is no excuse for the developers writing that system. So, your problem with homebrew, I say, the problem is homebrew not Apple.
  • chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    > It litterally comes down to that. The more fun name. I can't speak for anyone else, but I switched from MacPorts to Homebrew, after having previously switched from Fink to MacPorts many years ago despite not only being told but having actually experienced that Homebrew was slower and more fragile. And the reason was not "the more fun name." The reason was that both MacPorts and Fink were incredibly slow at expanding and updating their ports tree. Stuff that I knew from my Linux and FreeBSD days, or cool stuff that I read about on weblogs or in places like Slashdot and HN, was nearly always right there in a current or new-current version in Homebrew. That was rarely true of MacPorts: often it wasn't there at all, and if it was, it was often several minor or even a full major version behind. This may have changed since then -- I hope it has, since I suspect it's been over a decade at this point -- but IIRC, the last straw was trying to install the terminal version of a program (either Emacs or Vim, I think) that also had a GUI version available and, after going to make coffee and coming back to the computer, discovering MacPorts (a) didn't care that I had explicitly asked for the terminal version, it was going to install the GUI version for me anyway, and (b) because of MacPorts' aggressive "never depend on the system version of anything no way no how", it was building a new version of the entire bleeping XFree86 from source for me. Yes, I understand why MacPorts takes that "no system dependencies" approach; yes, I get that was probably a badly-specified port file. But I ripped it out and never looked back. Well, I take that back. I think I looked back once, about four years ago, to see if everything that I had installed under Homebrew on a machine could be installed with MacPorts, because maybe it was time to give it another chance. The answer was no, everything could not be installed. So the answer was no, it was not time to go back. I don't care that Homebrew has a fun name. I care that it has the stuff that I want kept reasonably current with upstream versions. Homebrew has, as far as I can tell, gotten a lot better over the years at not being fragile. It's still no speed demon, but the truth is that I don't actually run it that often. If a more native macOS package for a given piece of software is available, I'll install that in preference.