I wonder if Nix on macOS could become a better homebrew-killer by supporting Apple Silicon first. We already do aarch64-linux natively and some iOS cross compilation, so that should give us a head start.
I never got why homebrew got so popular given how terrible it is. But it was more accessible to people unfortunately. I spent some time trying to become a Gentoo developer for a while and then just gave up because there was no response.
I used to updated the clang patches to make newer clang versions compile things on osx before most of those things made it upstream.
I think it's vastly superior to macports and while I find nix interesting I don't really find it that practical. I think what makes homebrew more popular than the rest is how many precompiled packages exist. If gentoo-prefix had the same amount of precompiled packages, then I'd think it would definitely be much better for most users.
I moved over from Homebrew to Nix around 5 months ago, haven't since needed to use Homebrew except for casks.
[0] "Support for Apple Silicon (aarch64-darwin)" https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/95903
If you want to launch apps you've installed with Nix using Lanchpad or Spotlight, you can use nix-darwin[1] or home-manager[2] to create a symlink in ~/Applications, though the latter seems to have temporarily disabled this feature due to conflicts between the two.
[1]: https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/blob/master/modules/syste... [2]: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/blob/master/mo...
Right. I'm using home-manager on darwin and various apps like Emacs, Alacritty, Kitty are supported. However, many GUI apps are not, such as Firefox, so that's why I'm still using Homebrew's cask.
Sorry you get that impression. As one of the maintainers, my impression is that each decision happens in good faith, and usually follows a controversial discussion, which puts user experience on par with maintainers’s well-being.
Examples off the top of my head:
[1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/9172#issuecomment-7299...
[2]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/9177#issuecomment-72...
[3]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/9099#issuecomment-72...
That’s not to say your feelings aren’t valid. I can see how some unpopular decisions may come across as rude, thoughtless or selfish. I’m aware that this is still a huge issue, and my feeling is that we still have a lot to learn in order to get better and more transparent at communicating.
I’m thankful for feedback like yours (even though I strongly disagree with the part that I’ve quoted). You can be sure any such feedback has a real, positive impact on where we’re heading as a project.
nix is almost that, except some packages are too old but otherwise, I have it running identically on macOS and Linux.
Homebrew puts stuff in some weird location that is /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/ on Linux and that alone puts me off and it breaks if I change that location. No idea why they don't just use a path like /opt/homebrew/ for both OS and be done with it.
We’re now using `/opt/homebrew` for the (still experimental) ARM native Homebrew flavour.
On Linux, you’re free to choose whatever prefix you like. On Linux, Homebrew always builds from source, no matter the prefix.
Being a lonely maintainer means I’m a bit (a lot) late on package versions and some areas are hacking, but it works on Big Sur already. But then again I’m also most probably the sole user and only target audience given the popularity of alternatives.