Though I agree that in most cases package managers fulfill this need perfectly well, there are cases in which homebrew does provide something unique. Which is t

Though I agree that in most cases package managers fulfill this need perfectly well, there are cases in which homebrew does provide something unique. Which is the reason that I contributed a tiny bit to linuxbrew (reporting bugs and suggesting fixes). 1) You need the newest version (ffmpeg for example is something that is often out of date on linux distros, or what about the latest and greatest gcc or llvm, or...) 2) Your distro doesn't have it as a package. Case in point, debian (wheezy) doesn't have ag (the silver searcher). After getting some issues fixed on linuxbrew, I was able to do "brew install ag" on my debian an there it was, a fresh silver surfer. So I don't agree with most posters claiming or implying that homebrew for linux is useless. The closest (and arguably better) you can get is either Archlinux or Gentoo (of which I prefer Arch, which I used for a long time), but if you don't have free choice of distro, linuxbrew gets you quite far.