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Comment by nxpnsv | Hacker News Reader

I first check brew...

Yeah, this. MacOS is unusable without home-brew, especially cask. There is no greater feeling than knowing you can blow away your system disk, come back and re-install it, then add a "brew cask install .." stage to get all your apps installed automatically.

If I had brew on iOS, I'd be more than happy. Alas, I don't want to jailbreak though ..

Unusable for you, maybe. But I'm sure the majority of people use MacOS without homebrew and find it perfectly usable for their use cases.

Sure. There's still nothing quite as efficient as a one-liner brew command to get new stuff set up, though. My computer does the installing, not me ..

Maybe unusable for those that think macOS is GNU/Linux with a pretty UI.

I never installed any of those alternative UNIX toolchains. Apple SDK + native macOS tooling are more than enough.

>Maybe unusable for those that think macOS is GNU/Linux with a pretty UI.

This was the target of the WSL that Microsoft added to Windows. They won me. GNU/Linux with good UI, good software support and that doesn't break every month. It's like we're living in the future.

Yep, that is the main reason why WSL exists.

And as gateway drug into Azure as well, most likely.

I never had any use for SUA during all these years doing Windows development.

On the contrary, I use automated package management on MacOS to get my system ready for use, mostly installing .app's. MacOS has its plus points - user-centric power control over application installations and upgrade maintenance just isn't one of them.

Serious question to get you thinking about your toolset dependencies. Is MacOS useless without it, or are you?

Serious answer: neither are useless.

I just find MacOS 100x more useful because of homebrew, and frustrating without it.

The reason is, I can blow away the OS, restore a fresh install, and then re-install everything I need with a single command. This is highly empowering: I don't have to be a mouse-monkey to get everything set up, and can do other things meanwhile.

Doesn't mean MacOS is 'bad' - sure, others can get their systems set up however they want. App Store installs are fine, if you have the time to sit there, driving your system through everything ..

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