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Homebrew is a subpar choice on macOS; MacPorts is faster, has more packages, and is implemented more correctly than Brew. Additionally, MacPorts was co-created
by wwalexander 5y ago
Homebrew is a subpar choice on macOS; MacPorts is faster, has more packages, and is implemented more correctly than Brew.
Additionally, MacPorts was co-created by an engineer who also created the original FreeBSD Ports system, and thus hews much more closely to standard UNIX/BSD practices.
I’m not sure how and when Homebrew became the standard, but it is definitively worse.
- jwdunne 5y agoI came to realise this too. Using Homebrew and multiple users is excruciating and an eye opener on how system-level software should really be installed. Homebrew insists on avoiding root privileges whilst also installing packages system-wide. That works fine and is invisible with one user but falls down hard otherwise. Their documentation is incorrect too, saying that this is all fine because “we install in /usr/local/bin”. It’s not easy to change this. The solution was to embrace MacPorts which correctly requires root privileges to install system-wide packages. I haven’t looked back since. I haven’t missed brew or any software that’s available on brew alone.
- mekster 5y agoToo bad when I want to install newer fancy tools on Linux, it's easier to unify the environment with Homebrew instead of using Homebrew only on Linux (which has a very weird quirk that it wants to install in /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew (or else it'll start compiling so many packages instead rolling binary packages) instead of /opt/homebrew like any sane decision would've been.) I also don't understand Nix when it wants to make 30 users for build process and a few unintuitive decisions. Otherwise it's good that it works same on macOS and Linux.