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Comment by Flimm | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited about Homebrew potentially coming to Linux. When I first started using OS X more regularly, I was surprised by how better an experience OS X + Homebrew is compared to Ubuntu/Debian repositories + PPAs/third-party repositories.

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My experience is quite the opposite. Lots of missing packages in brew compared to debian. And brew has been nothing but trouble for all the devs in my team. It keeps messing up /usr/local permissions for some reason. And if you don't update brew frequently it will bork itself. Apt-get or better yet aptitude is rock solid.

They are more solid, but never up to date with new bits, so you're stuck managing your own curated list of ppa's.

Apt is as up to date as the repo you point it at.

It's pretty common to use Debian stable and vendor/community repos for specific packages you want more up-to-date packages of.

Isn't it there already?

https://github.com/Linuxbrew/brew

I don't know much about Linuxbrew, but that looks like a fork, not Homebrew officially supporting Linux.

We're attempting to merge the two projects so eventually Linuxbrew/brew can go away. It's a relatively slow process, though.

What about chromebrew [0] (homebrew for chrome os)?

[0]: https://github.com/skycocker/chromebrew

It doesn't appear related so would be hard to merge.

Really? From a user standpoint it seemed very similar.

Either way, I'd definitely be interested in something like homebrew for ChromeOS. Guides for cross-platform capabilities would be most welcome!

Why?

By which I mean that apt is fantastic AFAICT and totally integrated into Ubuntu and Debian. Why would you want a third party package manager?

The apt user experience is terrible compared with brew.

How so?

The interface seems more or less identical to me.

I'm not going to deny it's good and brings great stuff to the Mac, I'm just not seeing the advantages.

Other than "in every way possible"?

The only thing that is as easy in apt as brew is installing packages.

Searching, getting info about a package, updating the list of available packages, are all much easier with homebrew.

A reasonable thing to do would be to decide what the deficiencies are and first try to talk to the developers of APT about fixing them, and then as a second (lesser) option potentially deciding to make a higher-level wrapper or supplementary tool which helps these use cases. A totally unreasonable thing to do would be to attempt to replace the entire APT ecosystem with a different tool.

> Searching

apt search ....

> getting info about a package

apt show <package>

> updating the list of available packages

apt update

> are all much easier with homebrew

You gotta be kidding me

What don't you like about PPAs? I find them a great experience as both a user and maintainer.

I disagree that they are a "great experience" for users.

Here's my experience with PPAs:

1. Is it already in the Ubuntu / Debian repositories? Nope.

2. Search google for "Ubuntu <package name>".

3. Find some random website like some stack exchange question that tells me what couple of commands to run to get it into my repositories, or risk trying to navigate this disaster of a site.[1]

4. Finally, install the package!

On the other end of the spectrum, (this may be unfair and biased because this is what I"m familiar with), on Arch Linux, to get community maintained packages:

1. yaourt <package name>

2. hit corresponding number

3. answer prompts. (This step gives me the opportunity to analyze the build scripts if I so choose, which includes the source location.)

4. done.

[1]https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas

Edit: Actually that's not really a fair comparison. I forgot that Arch does not come with yaourt preinstalled. I would have the same complaints about downloading the tarball, unzipping, makepkg, and installing the package on Arch, so take my complaints with a grain of salt. I'm sure it's a good experience with a similar tool on Ubuntu.

Apt is the second worst linux package manager. RPM is the first worst.

`apt` isn't that bad, really—it's been available for a year or two now, and will likely replace apt-get and friends eventually (apt-cache, dpkg, dselect, are pretty horrible user experience really). RPM hasn't been a package manager for like 10 years—now it's just a package format. `yum` and its successor `dnf` are actually fantastic package managers on Red Hat family stuff.

IMO yum is slow as molasses, feature poor and really bad at resolving conflicts. Haven't tried dnf though.

I don't use Linux myself, but am curious as to why this has been so heavily downvoted.

Because Linuxes have their own package managers already, and Linuxers are outraged that some macOS freak is invading their lawn with an alternative.

I guess it is because default linux package managers already do a great job.

I personally don't use Mac OS(X), but what I understand is that Homebrew is a project designed to give the functionality of a Linux command-line package manager to OSX.

For most (all? Slackware...) Linux distributions, there is ONE package manager: for Debian/Ubuntu it's APT, for Arch it's Pacman, for RedHat & friends it's RPM, etc. There is exactly one, because all the files which aren't user data or configuration are owned by some package or other. It's all well and good when there's a clear need for this on OSX, and so Homebrew must keep up to date with the official software management and keep itself contained, not breaking anything. Having a second package manager on Linux, which doesn't treat Linux as the main target platform, seems both pointless and asking for trouble.

Alternatively, you could be harsh and figure that the downvoters were saying, "No, you don't prefer Homebrew. You prefer your distribution's package manager, and thou shalt use it correctly."

Ha, thanks that's a comprehensive answer. Maybe have been a bit of both, looks like the downvotes have been countered now anyway.

My issue with those APT on Debian is that I almost always have to add another PPA to download a version of something that I actually want to use. That reduces the utility of APT in my view. Having a crowdsourced list of Homebrew packages to install would be fabulous.

Not only that, but a lot of those PPAs become stale, or get replaced by others, and it's only when you upgrade the dist, that you get failures and discover this... It's pretty annoying. It would be nice to have a meta package manager for "current" PPAs for given projects that wraps apt with brew-like ability.

Additionally, creating and maintaining a PPA involves one of the following:

(a) Use the upload form for Launchpad.net [0]

(b) Host your own deb server [1]

Unless you use Bazaar for a VCS, the only time you login to Launchpad is to upload a new release. With Homebrew it's built into git with adding a new tag. A _LOT_ lower barrier to entry here.

[0]: https://help.launchpad.net/Projects/FileDownloads#Publishing...

[1]: https://www.unixmen.com/setup-local-apt-repository-using-ins...

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