22 engineers on Hacker News describe using Homebrew first-hand: 7 endorse it, 5 regret it, 3 are mixed.
“I've never had brew mess up my system and I've been using it and MacOS for over a decade”
endorse · personal · 10 yr · EasyMark · 2024-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“i cannot seem to trust homebrew's reliability :(”
regret · personal · SubMachineGhost · 2022-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the built-in installer/updater is more robust than brew and most of the time brew just invokes the native installer anyways.”
regret · production · fesc · 2022-02-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I won't even try it on my laptop. I already have homebrew, which is much simpler and works well for my purpouses.”
endorse · personal · cpach · 2022-02-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Been using Homebrew for a decade and haven't had serious problems with it in a very long time.”
endorse · personal · 10 yr · jolux · 2021-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“And then I usually give up, count my blessings for homebrew”
endorse · personal · n8henrie · 2021-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Homebrew for years and I've never felt negatively about the user experience, I find it easier to use than yum for example.”
endorse · personal · ddavis · 2019-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using brew for years and wasn't aware that it was using google analytics at all.”
mixed · personal · daveFNbuck · 2017-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use homebrew (having left macports in the dust), as I want stuff to work. And then along comes an update which just breaks everything.”
mixed · personal · hpcjoe · 2017-03-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it made a complete mess of my /usr/local/bin and also screwed up my install of rvm ... never again will I give it a chance.”
regret · personal · thomnific · 2016-09-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My main gripe is that the packages are of extremely poor quality. When I needed something, it was not compiled with the options I needed.”
regret · personal · 4ad · 2014-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Homebrew makes it work, but you're basically at the mercy of this third-party package system to keep things working”
mixed · production · cheald · 2013-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“my Mac is a far, far better development machine (well, aside from the fact that brew is weak sauce compared to a full-blown yum”
regret · production · demallien · 2012-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've had great success using Brew; I switch between 5.1 and 5.2 easily using the process I explain”
endorse · personal · ajacksified · 2012-10-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We are abundantly transparent about how we use Homebrew's bottle farm to take create a faster "client".”
neutral · personal · cachebag · 2026-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The only real annoyance I have is if macOS brew installed tmux v9001”
neutral · personal · jitl · 2024-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using the latter (installed from homebrew) for the last few years”
neutral · personal · C-x_C-f · 2024-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It also uses Homebrew to install a bunch of packages, then creates various config files.”
neutral · production · bloopernova · 2024-08-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Homebrew on Sonoma just fine since public launch.”
neutral · personal · 0.25 yr · _han · 2023-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We install enough utilities with `brew` to get pyenv working”
neutral · production · kortex · 2021-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At work we have a few shell scripts that we run through which will install homebrew, various software, and finally I grab my dotfiles.”
neutral · production · johnbellone · 2014-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?