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Comment by zumu | Hacker News Reader

> I know brew will package a ruby version to handle this...

Not to mention brew is vastly inferior to most Linux package managers (apt, yum, pacman, etc.)

Until you need/want some project that's relatively new and you pine for the days of brew. Technically inferior Perhaps but often much more up to date. :/

Not a problem with Arch packages and the AUR.

I've considered switching to arch because of that.

Manjaro has access to the AUR as well, and it's as polished as any distro I've used. For me it's the clear winner for developers and hobbyists

I completely agree. Having used Manjaro (xfce and i3 variants) as main OS for half a year, it has been a good experience.

To be fair, I can't compare with other distros as this was the first time I used Linux as main OS.

I heard great things about AUR when moving to Arch but honestly I've been unimpressed. A lot of stuff is already exists in official repos for other distributions, and I don't actually care about bleeding edge versions, just ease of install. And most of the time in my experience, AUR packages aren't very recent, or aren't configured how I'd like.

That said, you can just customise the PKGBUILD yourself, and even then it's no real stress to build from source yourself. Even if you then stabbed yourself in the eye with a pencil, it'd still be a better system than on MacOS or on Windows.

The problem I find with Arch Linux, and this really only has started happening recently, is that for some reason Arch loves to break stuff. My most unstable distribution had to do with Arch. I find that distros like Void and Alpine Linux offer more robust rolling release systems.

What in particular has broken for you? I've had the same Arch install for almost 6 years now, with no breakage at all. (Other than once or twice when I decided to reconfigure something and screwed it up. Always recoverable though, without a reinstall.)

I personally find that Alpine offers the least robust, because it doesn't even have a package mirror, so once a package gets updated (especially in Edge), then you can no longer download the old package, unless you build and sign it yourself. Arch has been incredibly stable for me, even more so than Ubuntu or Debian.

> The problem I find with Arch Linux, and this really only has started happening recently, is that for some reason Arch loves to break stuff.

Then I must be lucky. I've been using arch on my dev machine without notable breakages for about 2 years.

Linux distribution often have a parallel system for bleeding edge software.

On Ubuntu, it's snap.

I think the way to go is adding PPAs.

But yes, I agree we have great ways to have the latest and greatest.

not only on Ubuntu. I installed it on my PureOS machine. Works like a charm.

I always assumed this is because Linux package managers such as apt and yum are first-class citizens on the platform, while Homebrew is a bit of a de-facto solution on macOS.

This still holds, right?

Could also have a lot to do with Ruby. Chocolatey is way worse though (Windows).

Try Scoop on Windows instead of Chocolatey.

No, macports is non-native as well and is an excellent, stable alternative, although Homebrew has slightly better coverage. Homebrew's main issue is that it was written from scratch, ignoring lessons from 30+ years of package management experience, and there's no obvious benefit that doing so has brought. Compared to macports, which is based on freebsd ports, Homebrew is brittle and normal operations frequently result in an inconsistent state.

In my experience, unless your needs are extremely basic, sooner or later you'll run into an issue where the solution is basically to commit nuclear warfare on your filesystem and start over again. Also, expect to rely on random blog posts and stack overflow as the de facto user's guide (which maybe is just the state of the world for everything now.)

I've honestly never found a good reason to use brew instead of macports, aside from an annoying hipsterism. Welcome to try to convince me otherwise.

Macports is good, I'm also a fan of pkgsrc[0].

As to Homebrew, I don't understand why it complains if I use sudo to do an install but then also complains if I'm not running as an admin account! If there's a reason for this splitting of hairs, I don't know what it is.

[0] https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/

shrug use Mac for the generally superior UI, interface hardware, and app ecosystem, ssh into a Linux VM/server/workstation for the generally superior development experience. Best of both worlds.

Would be nice if Apple stepped up in respect to tools...

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