Hacker News Reader

Comment by tronicdude | Hacker News Reader

i..i've never seen a homebrew for linux user in the wild

I use Linuxbrew extensively across multiple WSL distros every day. As the “weird Windows person” on a team full of Mac users the experience is pretty uniform—the same brew commands for standing up a macOS dev environment mostly “just work” on WSL/Linux.

I use linuxbrew at work which uses relatively old SLES 12 machines with some odd configs. I find the nix portable solutions don't work because the kernel is too old to support the needed sandbox features. I do have a coworker who got NIX working in his account, but it was non-trivial, and still had issues.

Still, several homebrew packages need some tweaking, but that is straightforward.

I've started using it as a goto for vendor tooling (go, node, etc), great experience so far and will likely continue.

I've been using Linuxbrew for few months last year, it was always hit-or-miss whether some tool will work or if it will be macOS only recipe.

Then I started using aarch64 CPUs, and Linuxbrew still doesn't work on those. Bummer.

So while I'd love to see a package manager that spans all Linux distros, Homebrew is not it, at least for now. Nix may be it, but it has its own interesting issues at times.

I recently used distrobox to run Arch Linux container on Fedora host and it was a good experience. I did not try exposing the CLIs from there to the host OS but it sounds possible https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/d... . I don't want to daily-drive Arch again, but it's a great project to install fresh versions of various CLI tools from.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com