Personally I stopped using Homebrew after I got screwed too many times on mandatory upgrades that I couldn't pin. I use a combination of Mise and MacPorts now so I don't get any more surprise breakage and forced obsolescence. Plus Mise allows me to upgrade to any new version, whereas with Homebrew you have to wait for whenever the tap feels like upgrading (llama.cpp tap skips every 10 releases)

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bmurphy1976 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I was going to ask about others having this experience. I've been using MacPorts for a couple years to install developer tooling because it's far more consistent and doesn't surprise me with new major versions of Python at random. I only use Homebrew for application installation (i.e. Firefox, Slack, Spotify, etc.) that are not available in MacPorts.

Of course, I've also made a concerted effort over the years to migrate everything to uv for Python, pnpm for nodejs, etc. so maybe it's not an issue for me anymore?

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ryandrake 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've moved over to MacPorts due to Homebrew's aggressive support phase-out schedule[1]. My daily driver iMac is now in the Tier-3 "go away" bucket. Absolutely loved Homebrew for the short period of time I could use it, but I'm not going to get on the hardware update treadmill just to keep using it.

1: https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers

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mikemcquaid 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Glad you've found a workflow that works for you, genuinely.

For others still using Homebrew: a lot of work has gone into upgrading only when we absolutely have to and showing these upgrades to the user before we do them, including in this release.

	▲	pjm331 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		and i `brew update && brew upgrade --greedy` every morning with my first cup of coffee because i like to live on the edge like that thanks for all your work!

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PufPufPuf 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm in the "switched most to Mise" stage, might look into MacPorts for the remaining stuff, thanks for the tip!

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bigyabai 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nix is also worth checking out, even if the Darwin packaging is a bit flaky. I really appreciate having cross-platform devshells when I have to alternate between Mac and Linux on a regular basis.

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PufPufPuf 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Mise is also cross-platform, we actually use it at work for projects we develop locally on macOS, then build in CI on Linux -- it even supports multiplatform lockfiles. I had a few tries with Nix but it's a lot to wrap your head around, Mise is simple to "just try".

	▲	vhanda 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nix has a high learning curve. I now use Devbox [0] as it hides all the complexity of Nix while still giving all the benefits. Now I install far more packages via devbox (or devbox global) than I do via HomeBrew (on osx) or pacman (on arch). [0] - https://www.jetify.com/devbox

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frollogaston 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I switched to MacPorts because of permission issues with brew, used it for years, then switched back after MacPorts inexplicably started wanting to install like 9000 packages just to install something small-ish like wget. Which is probably just as likely to happen with any other package manager but whatever.