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OK but what I like about homebrew on mac is that when I'm having an issue with "popular stack X broke after updating" it's probably me and >10k other people out there, so by the time I hit the problem it's already under investigation on GH. I'm not sure the same would apply to homebrew on Linux - even if you ignore the differences between distros - how popular is homebrew on linux and linux desktop in comparison ?

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I wish more of those 10k people would help get others off of a package manager that is so fragile and convoluted that updating so often leads to popular things breaking.

Things like macports and pkgsrc do things in an arguably much simpler, more unixy way, without the contortions that so often seem to leave homebrew in a bind after routine operations like updating.

I’ve never experienced a broken homebrew and I’ve used Mac for years

Neither have I. My main complaint is that it's slow.

The comment was in response to parent's stated complaint, namely having to wait for someone else to resolve issues with popular packages being broken after an update, which has been the experience of more than one user.

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