4 ms·

What's so impressive about Homebrew specifically?

katbyte 6y ago
I dunno exactly but my coming back to Debian for a server recently the apt experience hasn’t been as nice as brew in terms of discovery and use
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  I am personally a fan of more lean solutions than apt, but there are several on Linux, like pacman (Arch), apk, (Alpine), Portage etc. Search: pacman -Ss <package> Install: pacman -S <package> Remove: pacman -R <package> Pacman is not tied specifically to Arch either.
  - spanhandler 6y ago
    Oddly enough, my favorite package management experiences, by far, have been Homebrew on Mac and Portage on Gentoo. Talk about polar opposites. I do think, unfortunately, that the experience of a very stable base of macOS with Homebrew on top would be nearly impossible to replicate on desktop Linux, because Linux's GUI layer is so intertwined with user software, and is so... uh, "free and libre", I guess, is a nice way to put it. You'd end up with a bunch of copies of KDE and Gnome libs and probably multiple competing IPC buses or god knows what, in no time. Maybe multiple sound daemons stepping on each other. You'd probably have issues like different apps deciding to do scaling or font rendering differently, or who knows what, because lots of "basic features" on macOS are instead choices on Linux.
kelvie 6y ago
Also curious. I'm waiting, or even begging for something like flatpak on mac os just due to the number of times pip/npm/python in general has broken due to homebrew.
- boogies 6y ago
  What's wrong with elementary OS? (pls don't kill me HN — Edit: yup, downvoted for a simple question)
  - spanhandler 6y ago
    • Nothing available that's as lightweight and good as Apple's "office"-type suite. • Nothing as all-around good as Preview (yes, seriously). • Worse battery life, partly due to worse OS optimizations and partly due to not having Safari available. Solutions to this in Linux that actually yield good results usually involve hard-capping performance at a pretty low level, IME. • Little things like screen recording and screenshot capabilities not being as nice for basic use, out of the box. • AFAIK not only is the default English keyboard on Linux far worse at the task of writing in English than that on macOS, there's not a single alternative layout that's close to as good as the Mac default. Yes, I'm dead serious about this, and frankly it's friggin' weird they'd have such a significant advantage on something like that in the year 2020, and I really wish other operating systems would catch up because I do not like being forced to use Apple products just so my experience composing documents in English isn't bad. I do not understand how they still have such a large advantage here, but somehow, they do. Totally baffling. • If you do anything serious with software-UI-related graphic design, or work closely with people who do, you pretty much need a Mac because odds are good you'll be using at least some mac-only software or have things shared with you that work only in mac programs. • You lose a variety of time-saving integrations with i-devices, if you're someone who takes advantage of those.
    - PaulBGD_ 6y ago
      I'm not understanding the English keyboard complaint, am I missing something?
      - spanhandler 6y ago
        Look up how you type: those • characters I used in my post, an m-dash (—), a c-cedilla (ç), a german double-S (ß), basic accented characters for various Western European languages (we have many, many loan words and phrases from those in English—façade, résumé, áñ∂ §ò öñ), punctuation for French and Spanish (no, you don't strictly need these for English—but in practice, depending on the register you're writing in, actually you do), major world currency symbols ($, £, €, ¥, ¢), basic mathematical symbols and mathy Greek letters (≤, ∑) and so on. Look up how you do that on US English keyboard layouts in macOS, Linux, or Windows. Then check AltGr and US International alternative layouts for the latter two. Marvel at how macOS manages to crush all those options in usability with their default, without affecting the experience for someone who doesn't need those at all. Join me in wondering how no-one else has at least matched them on this, which is not some recently-added feature in macOS, but is practically ancient in computing terms.
spanhandler 6y ago
1) Rarely breaks. Worst I've seen is needing a permissions tweak after an OS upgrade, in many years of use. Back when I switched from Macports I switched because ordinary usage kept rendering Macports so goddamn broken that it was easier to nuke its directory and start over rather than figure out how to fix whatever my bold command of "install package" had destroyed this time. I've never seen normal or even slightly abnormal use put Homebrew in a broken state that required manual intervention to fix. 2) Command line UI is alright. This should be a given but isn't always. 3) Can manage proprietary software for me. There's almost nothing I use (maybe actually nothing?) on my Mac that Homebrew doesn't have an up-to-date package for, aside from Apple-provided apps. 4) Enough people use it that despite being a semi-free-for-all community-run thing packages are pretty much never broken, including the proprietary ones. I'm also continually surprised by how often I find some obscure thing with five stars on Github, want to try it out, and sure enough, there's a Homebrew package. 5) Lets you manage your packages with ordinary user-level permissions. No root elevation required. 6) I can clean practically all of what it's done and get back to a nearly-vanilla system (with the exception of some of the proprietary apps) by deleting one directory. My system and GUI will still boot like nothing's happened. IMO keeping your user-level packages strictly separate from the system-level ones, and managed totally separately, is absolutely the right way to go. I didn't realize how much I wanted this until I started using Homebrew on a Mac, after many many years of Linux package management. 7) It leaves system-level packages that it upgrades alone, so doesn't break core system stuff (I would fucking love this to become a norm on Linux—system uses and assumes latest LTS version for stuff like Python, but I can install whatever version I like for my own use, without affecting that whatsoever and without having to use a different goddamn version-management tool for every single language) 8) I'm pretty sure you can have more than one version of something installed at once and there's a command to switch between them (juggling symlinks, probably), but my recollection of this is vague and may be wrong. 9) If you're actually doing multi-user on your desktop/laptop I think it lets you have per-user install directories and active packages—but I don't really know anyone who does this, and haven't known people to share a computer, really, since over 15 years ago. Amusingly enough, iPads, with practically nothing resembling multi-user support, are the exception to this use pattern, as those seem to get shared among members of a family all the time. Bad things: 1) Requires Ruby (seems like a dumb complaint, I know, but I hate installing an entire scripting language for a single command line tool, and no not all Linux distros ship with Ruby by default, far from it) 2) I dunno if it still does (I'm working mostly on Debian now) but for approximately forever it's had a completely braindead default for how often it auto-updates its package list when running other commands, and you had to go change that every time you installed it on a new machine so you'd not rip your hair out in frustration when your command to install a package was delayed because it'd been a whopping 16 minutes since the last time it checked for updated packages. Why the hell this didn't default to, like, 12 hours or something is entirely beyond me. AFAIK everyone hates the default behavior, to the point that it's become a common jokey-reference among Mac nerds, and I've never been able to figure out why anyone would want it.

I dunno exactly but my coming back to Debian for a server recently the apt experience hasn’t been as nice as brew in terms of discovery and use

AsyncAwait 6y ago
I am personally a fan of more lean solutions than apt, but there are several on Linux, like pacman (Arch), apk, (Alpine), Portage etc. Search: pacman -Ss <package> Install: pacman -S <package> Remove: pacman -R <package> Pacman is not tied specifically to Arch either.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  Oddly enough, my favorite package management experiences, by far, have been Homebrew on Mac and Portage on Gentoo. Talk about polar opposites. I do think, unfortunately, that the experience of a very stable base of macOS with Homebrew on top would be nearly impossible to replicate on desktop Linux, because Linux's GUI layer is so intertwined with user software, and is so... uh, "free and libre", I guess, is a nice way to put it. You'd end up with a bunch of copies of KDE and Gnome libs and probably multiple competing IPC buses or god knows what, in no time. Maybe multiple sound daemons stepping on each other. You'd probably have issues like different apps deciding to do scaling or font rendering differently, or who knows what, because lots of "basic features" on macOS are instead choices on Linux.

kelvie 6y ago

Also curious. I'm waiting, or even begging for something like flatpak on mac os just due to the number of times pip/npm/python in general has broken due to homebrew.

boogies 6y ago
What's wrong with elementary OS? (pls don't kill me HN — Edit: yup, downvoted for a simple question)
- spanhandler 6y ago
  • Nothing available that's as lightweight and good as Apple's "office"-type suite. • Nothing as all-around good as Preview (yes, seriously). • Worse battery life, partly due to worse OS optimizations and partly due to not having Safari available. Solutions to this in Linux that actually yield good results usually involve hard-capping performance at a pretty low level, IME. • Little things like screen recording and screenshot capabilities not being as nice for basic use, out of the box. • AFAIK not only is the default English keyboard on Linux far worse at the task of writing in English than that on macOS, there's not a single alternative layout that's close to as good as the Mac default. Yes, I'm dead serious about this, and frankly it's friggin' weird they'd have such a significant advantage on something like that in the year 2020, and I really wish other operating systems would catch up because I do not like being forced to use Apple products just so my experience composing documents in English isn't bad. I do not understand how they still have such a large advantage here, but somehow, they do. Totally baffling. • If you do anything serious with software-UI-related graphic design, or work closely with people who do, you pretty much need a Mac because odds are good you'll be using at least some mac-only software or have things shared with you that work only in mac programs. • You lose a variety of time-saving integrations with i-devices, if you're someone who takes advantage of those.
  - PaulBGD_ 6y ago
    I'm not understanding the English keyboard complaint, am I missing something?
    - spanhandler 6y ago
      Look up how you type: those • characters I used in my post, an m-dash (—), a c-cedilla (ç), a german double-S (ß), basic accented characters for various Western European languages (we have many, many loan words and phrases from those in English—façade, résumé, áñ∂ §ò öñ), punctuation for French and Spanish (no, you don't strictly need these for English—but in practice, depending on the register you're writing in, actually you do), major world currency symbols ($, £, €, ¥, ¢), basic mathematical symbols and mathy Greek letters (≤, ∑) and so on. Look up how you do that on US English keyboard layouts in macOS, Linux, or Windows. Then check AltGr and US International alternative layouts for the latter two. Marvel at how macOS manages to crush all those options in usability with their default, without affecting the experience for someone who doesn't need those at all. Join me in wondering how no-one else has at least matched them on this, which is not some recently-added feature in macOS, but is practically ancient in computing terms.

spanhandler 6y ago

1) Rarely breaks. Worst I've seen is needing a permissions tweak after an OS upgrade, in many years of use. Back when I switched from Macports I switched because ordinary usage kept rendering Macports so goddamn broken that it was easier to nuke its directory and start over rather than figure out how to fix whatever my bold command of "install package" had destroyed this time. I've never seen normal or even slightly abnormal use put Homebrew in a broken state that required manual intervention to fix. 2) Command line UI is alright. This should be a given but isn't always. 3) Can manage proprietary software for me. There's almost nothing I use (maybe actually nothing?) on my Mac that Homebrew doesn't have an up-to-date package for, aside from Apple-provided apps. 4) Enough people use it that despite being a semi-free-for-all community-run thing packages are pretty much never broken, including the proprietary ones. I'm also continually surprised by how often I find some obscure thing with five stars on Github, want to try it out, and sure enough, there's a Homebrew package. 5) Lets you manage your packages with ordinary user-level permissions. No root elevation required. 6) I can clean practically all of what it's done and get back to a nearly-vanilla system (with the exception of some of the proprietary apps) by deleting one directory. My system and GUI will still boot like nothing's happened. IMO keeping your user-level packages strictly separate from the system-level ones, and managed totally separately, is absolutely the right way to go. I didn't realize how much I wanted this until I started using Homebrew on a Mac, after many many years of Linux package management. 7) It leaves system-level packages that it upgrades alone, so doesn't break core system stuff (I would fucking love this to become a norm on Linux—system uses and assumes latest LTS version for stuff like Python, but I can install whatever version I like for my own use, without affecting that whatsoever and without having to use a different goddamn version-management tool for every single language) 8) I'm pretty sure you can have more than one version of something installed at once and there's a command to switch between them (juggling symlinks, probably), but my recollection of this is vague and may be wrong. 9) If you're actually doing multi-user on your desktop/laptop I think it lets you have per-user install directories and active packages—but I don't really know anyone who does this, and haven't known people to share a computer, really, since over 15 years ago. Amusingly enough, iPads, with practically nothing resembling multi-user support, are the exception to this use pattern, as those seem to get shared among members of a family all the time. Bad things: 1) Requires Ruby (seems like a dumb complaint, I know, but I hate installing an entire scripting language for a single command line tool, and no not all Linux distros ship with Ruby by default, far from it) 2) I dunno if it still does (I'm working mostly on Debian now) but for approximately forever it's had a completely braindead default for how often it auto-updates its package list when running other commands, and you had to go change that every time you installed it on a new machine so you'd not rip your hair out in frustration when your command to install a package was delayed because it'd been a whopping 16 minutes since the last time it checked for updated packages. Why the hell this didn't default to, like, 12 hours or something is entirely beyond me. AFAIK everyone hates the default behavior, to the point that it's become a common jokey-reference among Mac nerds, and I've never been able to figure out why anyone would want it.