What are the symptoms of an ‘unclean’ Mac? It should be possible to say with some exactness what’s causing them with the use of diagnostic tools like ‘top’, or just the Activity Monitor app.

I’ll admit that _fixing_ issues might not be straightforward - but I can’t recall the last time I reinstalled my Mac aside from buying a new one with a new installation - although I don’t think that should really count...

Dave is out walking early one morning. The streets are quiet, but for one man sprinkling a white powder along the middle of the road. Intrigued, Dave approaches the man and asks what he is doing.

The man explains he is sprinkling elephant powder - he does it every morning. Dave is visibly puzzled. The man continues “it keeps the elephants away”.

Dave, still puzzled, says “But there are no elephants here!”.

In agreement the man exclaims “Great stuff, isn’t it!”

Removing brew stuff is trivial, and with sip being the default it’s really hard to put the machine in a state that requires a clean install.

I’m really unsure how someone could put up with clean installing needing to be part of their workflow for that long without questioning whether that’s normal or not.

Even in the pre-sip days, I’d have to go out of my way to make my Mac unusable since it’s a very opinionated platform of isolating data/apps into very specific locations.

unless a kext is involved. Then all hell breaks loose.

And Xcode itself does not help. I install Xcode. Well, actually, I didn't, because you need to actually start Xcode for it to completely install itself. It seems to come with a complete set of command-line tools; I can compile and run plain Unix stuff from the command line. Great. Except when you try to run Homebrew, that complains that you don’t have the True Command Line Tools; you need to run xcode-select --install to install what appears to be a completely different copy of the same things. Wtf?