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Comment by tbrock | Hacker News Reader

You know, for all the nerding out about how package managers do their work and how “correct” they are, they all still pale in comparison to how easy and intuitive homebrew is to use.

I’m running Linux and pacman/yay are great but if something is screwed up I miss being able to run brew doctor to figure out what’s wrong or add a tap for some weird thing here or there.

I know I’ll get crucified for saying it but usability counts for a lot and apt, dpkg, yum, dnf, and yes, even nix suck. All the correctness and perfection don’t matter if nobody uses or wants to use your software.

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Yeah, UX matters, but reliability and robustness are part of UX, too.

I've had innocuous-seeming brew commands foul up my working environment. I don't think Nix would do that in the same way.

Specifically, updating a package in Homebrew can have unexpected knock-on effects due to updating dependencies. Left my working environment badly hosed at one point last year.

Nix's design should ensure that all such updates leave everything else stable, as I understand it.

I've been tempted to try it or Guix for years - I was delighted when I discovered Nix existed.

I'd been thinking about the problems with existing package managers for years, and both Nix and Guix have most of what I felt was missing from the existing tools, along with some other really cool attributes I hadn't thought of at all.

I haven't used a Mac so I don't know what UX breakthroughs I might be missing but I think even for beginners, apt and the like are fine, given how much assistance software and online help there is for them.

It does take you a while to understand everything about it but that's always the case with power tools. You'll likely not need to dive into the guts of your package manager on day one anyways.

No. apt-get install for installing and apt-cache search for searching? That’s... not discoverable to say the least: how about brew install and brew search? Didn’t know they were there? No problem you’ll see they are available commands when you run brew.

The exact same applies to apt. You can do "apt search", "apt install" and just "apt" will give you a short help text. This is the default apt program for interactive use. Unfortunately few people advertise it in tutorials.

Oh and you can of course use "man" to read the manual pages for most apt programs if you want more in-depth info.

How is brew different from apt or dnf?

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