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Comment by irateswami | Hacker News Reader

Homebrew is more transparent and approachable, I can easily customize what is being installed, it's versioning, and control it's dependencies better than apt.

Apt, more often than not, acts as a gatekeeper for the latest version of whatever software packages I'm trying to install. I end up just having to adding various libraries and repos to my sources list to get the version I need, or go to an outside dependency manager like gvm, sdkman, etc which is basically homebrew anyway.

Homebrew is for devs that need to get shit done, apt is for computer scientists that love the tool more than solving problems with a tool. For the record, I'm on both linux and mac and there's plenty of upside and downside to both.

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> Apt, more often than not, acts as a gatekeeper for the latest version

It's a distro policy issue, not a package manager issue. There are rolling distros using apt - for example https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable which is updated every 6 hours.

The same way rpm is just a packaging format - you can have both the stable (fosilised) CentOS and the fresh Fedora / CentOS-Stream using it.

You're extrapolating from Debian's packaging concept to other distros, though your argument does not apply to most of the rolling distros out there.

On a rolling distro (e.g. using pacman, or say yast2 and others for sake of argument) you typically ship the header files included with the libraries, so that you don't need multiple versions of the same library installed. On Debian/Ubuntu, however, it will always end up with that mess of dozens of versions of the same library because all PPAs are somewhat outdated and used different versions of specific libraries once they were published.

That's the problem isn't it? Whichever problem you point at in Linux, the answer is invariably the same: "you're holding it wr^W^W^^W you're using the wrong distro, the wrong package manager, the wrong DE, the wrong version of any of those things".

And, invariably, for any problem the one true combination is different.

This case already started with discussion about brew. Brew is a choice you make if you don't like other distribution platforms on a Mac. But guess what - some people complain about brew not keeping software stable, but rather chasing new versions!

This is not a Linux issue - wherever you have different options and use cases you'll find different recommendations depending on what people are trying to achieve.

And that's why forks suck and everyone should use a spork. Having options that cater to different usecases is confusing. You don't really need to take big bites anyway.

- Hey, your fork is broken, and made out of plastic.

- You should use the oak box set of Forkuntu 12.4, no problems with forks there.

- Yes, but it lacks any spoons

- For spoons there's always Spoontoo.

- But... I want both spoons and forks...

- For that you can always tweak a few dozen unrelated work orders, menus and item descriptions in Sporkian. But that will only work witn Sporkian unstable, and needs a special tablecloth.

- Okay... What about knives?

Well, if you would report a bug for Office 2003, the maintainers at Microsoft would react the exact same way. That is if you persist on calling through the corporate structure until you actually are able to contact one.

Either that or well, they'll simply ignore the noise of a user that doesnt give a damn about updating anything - so the user would not receive any potential patch anyways.

If you decide on choosing a specific distro, you should know what you're choosing. If what you are complaining is too much choice, then maybe MSDOS 1.x is the best operating system for you?

The beauty of Linux is customization. If you don't agree with that, then stay on MacOS. No harm done.

But if what you're complaining about is that you lack the skills to understand and investigate - without having paid anyone anything - then honestly, I think you are an ungrateful user that nobody should help out because it's a waste of (everybody's) _free_ time.

Be nice and maintainers will be nice, too. Be cooperative and they'll be cooperative as well.

> If you decide on choosing a specific distro, you should know what you're choosing.

Indeed. And when that distro is MacOS suddenly HN is up in arms about how "not understanding why developers are chosing it".

> I can easily customize what is being installed, it's versioning, and control it's dependencies better than apt

In terms of customizability, is Homebrew any different from Apt? As far as I'm aware, Nix and Guix is the only system package manager that allows me to have full control over versioning and inter-package dependencies. Other package managers only let me install packages as provided by the packagers.

More accurate to say that apt is for the sysadmin, perhaps.

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