I sure wish Homebrew would cease being cited as a standard or defacto package manager for macOS. It is a recent development, leaves so very much to be desired while also leaving a mess, boxes permissions, takes its annoying metaphor too far and has no advantage over any other package manager. Why the constant advertisement for adoption? Give me MacPorts any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Homebrew has been around for a long time. I've never seen a better alternative for macOS, do you think you could mention any of them?

Regarding MacPorts:

> MacPorts distributes source code that is compiled on install, so Macports is generally much slower to install packages. Macports installs packages under “/opt/local”. Macports uses root, which can lead to users goofing up their system or workplace policy issues

Sounds horrifying

Homebrew has been pretty poor IME. It is not possible to pin the homebrew repository per project, dependency confusion happens a lot (try installing different versions of core libraries at the same time), the way it messes with macOS file system permissions in /usr/local should be considered a risk (and not working with multiple users), and it’s generally very slow.

At this point I only use Homebrew for casks and Nix for everything else on macOS, which is far more up to date, reproducible, and cross-platform.

It's straightforward enough that the software devs I work with consider it "painless" to use.

asdf describes itself as "asdf is a CLI tool that can manage multiple language runtime versions on a per-project basis. It is like gvm, nvm, rbenv & pyenv (and more) all in one!"