Homebrew is two package management systems with one command line interface. One is MacPorts but worse and with more contributors (formulae, i.e., the main part

Homebrew is two package management systems with one command line interface. One is MacPorts but worse and with more contributors (formulae, i.e., the main part of Homebrew). The other (casks) is like Chocolatey on Windows, and downloads the installers or bundle images for GUI apps from their official websites, and then does its best to install them non-interactively for you on an ad-hoc basis. Casks are worth using because they fill a gap that 'proper' package managers mostly don't. Installing GUI apps automatically in this way isn't really package management, but it's still better than installing them manually. Homebrew's main functionality, on the other hand, still has all of the same problems it always has. It also has the advantage that it's more likely to include trendy, new utilities than MacPorts is because it has more contributors. I recommend installing Homebrew to a local prefix under your user (e.g., ~/.opt/homebrew) and using it exclusively for 'casks', but continuing to use MacPorts. If you need something that's not packaged in MacPorts yet, consider Nix instead of Homebrew. The package collection, Nixpkgs, is massive and even more up-to-date than Homebrew, and nothing installed from it will break anything from MacPorts (or be affected by anything MacPorts, either). MacPorts is more likely to include Mac-specific software, but if you're curious about alternatives in general, Pkgsrc is also a sound choice, and you can probably try it alongside MacPorts without breaking anything.