This might sounds weird but… anyone has installed homebrew on their linux machine? Does it work well?

@jtr I'm not a fan of course the fact that it creates a user and user directory... But until I installed a program that needed homebrew I had 0 prior experience. I think it did the job, but the user thing concerned me, so I just removed both.

@chaslinux @jtr Following - (I used a script on my Mac to parse my Applications folder to give me a list of all the apps that are available in Homebrew but not installed that way on my machine - then I replaced them all with Homebrew)

@jtr I run Homebrew on Linux, it works fine for the moment, but I want to get rid of it because they are excited about LLMs and using them to write their code now.

@jtr I explored this a while back and eventually dropped it in annoyance. Instead, I use conda as a common package/env approach across my Mac and linux systems.

@7robots what was annoying, if you can share?

@amerpie I’m assuming you mean non-Apple apps that are open source, etc. Any advantage for homebrew over the store from your perspective (besides that it’s faster and free of all kinds of GUI interruptions from Apple overlords, of course)

@jtr Your assumption is correct. Since Homebrew is CLI based (although GUI’s exist), I can run a simple command in my terminal regularly and keep everything up to date. I have an app review blog and so I download and use more apps than most folks - currently have over 600 installed.

@amerpie that’s a good point about how many apps you have… CLI must make this much easier.

@jtr on the mac, homebrew didn’t (at least at the time, not sure if this has changed) provide direct virtual environment support. for software prototyping, being able to install everything (or specific versions) in something like a venv or conda env is really useful for compartmentalization and portability across different projects with different needs. on linux (or more specifically docker containers that I was building), it seemed like a lot of extra work to get homebrew stuffed into a container compared to how easy it was to use venv or conda to install from a requirements list. It’s not that it didn’t work, it just felt like extra friction. This may have also changed for the better, not sure!