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Homebrew is abysmally slow as is. It is a shame it has the most packages as it is the worst package manager out of Windows, Linux and Mac now that winget is GA.

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I've extensively used: apt/dpkg (Debian and Ubuntu), rpm (Mandrake, Red Hat, Fedora), portage (Gentoo), and MacPorts. I also have some experience with package management on Void, Arch, and FreeBSD. I wanna say I used some unofficial package manager on BeOS back in the day, too, and I'm pretty sure QNX had one though I don't remember much about those.

HomeBrew is my favorite of them, overall. Though Portage is pretty damn great, for what it is.

I used to love pacman, but I never used Arch professionally so I can imagine it can have its share of problems.

Among Mac package managers, I think nix with nix-darwin is the best option.

MacPorts nominally has several times more packages than Homebrew.

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