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Homebrew is one of those tools that actually makes MacOS a decent Unix workstation for engineering (often, it feels like in spite of Apple). Without brew, MacOS would not be an OS I would even consider for my personal machines -- but I really enjoy MacOS now that it's on the M1/M2.

Although, admittedly, I use Nix-Darwin to manage my Homebrew apps.

Thanks for your contributions to Homebrew :)

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Used to feel this way until I discovered MacPorts. So much faster than brew and prefer it placing everything in /opt and not relying on system binaries. Now I only use homebrew to manage Casks and a few esoteric binaries (really rare).

brew on Apple Silicon Macs also install everything in /opt.

Yup noticed this. Which just reinforces my belief that MacPorts is better designed than homebrew.

well that specific advantage from a design point of view is gone for sure. What other design advantages do you see?

Thank you for your kind words! The maintainers deserve nearly all of the credit; these days, I mostly just do a bit of security automation stuff and defend their work when it comes up here :-)

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