Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

I've seen countless people trying a new technology/tool, and overselling it as 'amazing' and super easy.

Seeing a post like yours helps to keep the discussion grounded in reality, with tools that looks nice on paper but have practical downsides as well.

My experience has been that very, very rarely is any installation as straightforward as "curl && ./configure && make PREFIX=whatever install", partially due to everyone in the known universe thinking they need some awesome new build system, partially due to unknown dependencies and their versions, partially due to it usually needing some patches because they only build on the author's machine, and all of that is just noise when I just want to have something running

The value of Homebrew to me are the constantly bumped formulae descriptors, definitely, 100% NOT the "brew" frontend for it. So, I've found a nice middle-ground by switching Homebrew into developer mode and neutering its bottle system and using "--build-from-source"

This isn't necessarily to lobby you, as much as "for your consideration" and to raise awareness for others that one need not throw the baby out with the bathwater just because the brew frontend is user-hostle

apt/dpkg and any other package manager that scatters files all over the filesystem is just an absolute disaster that--if you do a lot of R&D tinkering--eventually renders a computer unusable after a few years. That's what happened to my first WSL instance; no apt command would work anymore because it had broken its own dependencies.