this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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What's wrong with homebrew?
Other people's software is great, what was asked is why the Apple hate.
Apple doesn't provide Homebrew, Apple updates *in the past have occasionally broken it horribly. (Looking at you El Capitan)
But while we are taking a look at home brew, If you need a specific version of something you are occasionally up a creek. It's been a hot few years since I was daily driving OSX *as my primary, but when I needed a certain version of memcache or a certain version of netcat for a feature, It just wasn't there and then compiling it for the OS was a far bigger pain in the ass than it is on any Linux distro.
Homebrew might as well be default.
That makes about as much sense as saying that pip, gem, npm, cargo, or nix should called be the default package manager on Mac OS...
The default package manager is the default because it manages the system's software. RPM, Deb/apt, pacman, etc. Homebrew is like pip or docker or cargo or snap or whatever else. You can set it up if you'd like but it's certainly not a default. (Though I'm not trying to dispute that it's good 😊)
Mac OS doesn't have a good default package management solution (though they would if they just opened up the app store and added a CLI). It's ok to admit it, and say that third party folks (who Apple does not support unless I'm missing something) are powering a pretty good third party experience. If only Apple cared about people who wanted a truly free an customizable computer, they could make a great OS :)
Homebrew is fairly different from pip, cargo or npm in that only python developers use pip, only rust developers use cargo, etc. And those are mostly used to manage libraries, rather than executables.
Meanwhile, essentially everyone who uses the console uses homebrew regardless of what programming languages they might or might not use. I was making a joke about how good, useful and basically required homebrew is.