Homebrew
6 recommend 3 criticize 4 moved to it 3 moved away
Why hackers recommend it
“I reluctantly switched from MacPorts to Homebrew around 2014. At that time Homebrew had that yuck factor by recommending it be installed into /usr/local rather than /opt.”kccqzy, 2026-09-13original comment ↗
“I found homebrew updated formulas faster than macports did”ihuman, 2026-09-13original comment ↗
“At the time, Homebrew was less finicky and better at resolving dependency conflicts.”apothegm, 2026-09-13original comment ↗
“I personally switched from Mise back to Brew. I don't know if it was just my skill issue, but there were too many packages which found Mise to be problematic.”thatxliner, 2026-06-11original comment ↗
“Homebrew (plus brew outdated) covered CLI tools and a subset of apps.”Simplita, 2026-01-03original comment ↗
“For everything else (zoom, slack, vscode, firefox, etc) I use homebrew packages.”perrygeo, 2026-01-02original comment ↗
What hackers criticize
“I had more problems with brew, where some package needed to be updated that I did not want, and I caused a cascade of issues.”teh64, 2026-09-13original comment ↗
“I switched from Homebrew to MacPorts a few years ago because of Homebrew's aggressive dropping of macOS versions”ryandrake, 2026-09-13original comment ↗
“I switched from brew to https://asdf-vm.com/ for this very reason.”midenginedcoupe, 2026-06-12original comment ↗
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Hackers moved from Homebrew to
- Homebrew → MacPorts (2 hackers)
- Homebrew → asdf (1 hacker)
Hackers moved to Homebrew from
- MacPorts → Homebrew (3 hackers)
- mise → Homebrew (1 hacker)
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