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I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

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Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#91

Post by emchammer »

tacker2000 wrote: post #74
Sytten wrote: post #21

My homebrew story is always something along the lines of: Me: Please install software A. Homebrew: In order to install it I will also install 20 libraries (some need to be built from source), update openssl, update Python and wreck all virtual environments. Also since its been a while I decided it must be time to upgrade your other unrelated packages. Enjoy!

Yea, homebrew feels like a package manager for people who have no idea what packages or versions are. Its doing so much hand-holding and extra stuff, it cant be really considered “pro” at all. What bothers me the most is when they immediately remove packages because they get EOL’ed, but in the real world it doesn’t work like this. I still have projects that use old PHP versions for example and brew just refuses to in…

Doesn’t homebrew have launchd unit files now? When it was supposed to be totally self-contained? Homebrew is lost.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#92

Post by crabique »

timcobb wrote: post #7
sroussey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also had a bad time with brew back then. On new machines these days no issues at all.

Every time I need to update anything on brew, I end up updating thousands of packages and it goes on and on for a long time.

The trick for smooth experience is to treat it like `pacman -Syu`:

  brew update && brew upgrade && brew autoremove && brew cleanup && brew doctor
Running this every few days and fixing everything that it explicitly complains about kept me issue-free for the last 10 years or so.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#93

Post by thiht »

wyager wrote: post #22
Sytten wrote: post #21

My homebrew story is always something along the lines of: Me: Please install software A. Homebrew: In order to install it I will also install 20 libraries (some need to be built from source), update openssl, update Python and wreck all virtual environments. Also since its been a while I decided it must be time to upgrade your other unrelated packages. Enjoy!

I remember when homebrew first came out it was pretty snappy and didn't do a bunch of extraneous nonsense. A remarkably precipitous decline in software quality

Except that’s just your opinion, not everyone agrees that it’s "in decline" or does "nonsense". Homebrew is exactly what I want from my desktop package manager: I want everything I install from Homebrew to always be in an evergreen state, I’m ok with everything being in latest and Homebrew forcing package maintainers to work with the latest of their dependencies. This ends up being remarkably stable, and I actually get a looot less of version incompatibilities than when I used Linux (easy because I don’t get any with Homebrew).

If I want a specific version of something I don’t mind using a specific version manager (eg. asdf or mise)

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#94

Post by lrvick »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #46
c-hendricks wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to use Arch in a VM on macOS, but Arch ARM is pretty bad. From the installation experience, the frequent stops in updates because something is compiling, to Chromium being broken for months.

Consider Alpine, if it fits your needs. The ARM support if first class.

But Alpine does not even attempt reproducible builds, maintainer signing, etc. Running Alpine means anyone with access to the git repo or build server can push any code they want to your system.

Alpine is a musl research/hobby distro at best.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#95

Post by thewebguyd »

zuhsetaqi wrote: post #88
seec wrote: post #56

It's interesting and all but in typical "Apple switcher" fashion, a preposterous comparison is/will be made: the M4 Pro MBP is around 3K€, replacing a laptop that seems to go for around 1K€ at best. When something costs 3 times as much, it should be better. It's a bit like comparing an entry level Ford to an S class Mercedes. I think the best "feature" of Apple computers is that it prevents cheapskates from making ba…

Well a 1k MacBook Air has the same build quality as the 3k MacBook Pro. It just has less performance. I have a HP ZBook from work and for 3k you don’t get the build quality of a 1k MacBook Air. In my experience when you only compare on build quality of laptops there’s nothing that’s on the level of current MacBooks.

Beyond just build quality too. The $1k air has phenomenal speakers for a laptop, a great display (albeit, no 120hz), and a touchpad that is unmatched on any other laptop. Plus, it's silent.

For $1k in the WinTel world you're lucky to get 1920x1200, or even worse, 16:9 1920x1080 as the standard. I switched to Mac the day the M1 came out, and haven't looked back despite how much I miss Linux. macOS grew on me, and I can't stomach paying $3k+ for a machine that is still substandard to a $1k MacBook Air.

The only laptop that comes close is the new arm Surface Laptop 7, but - no Linux on that for now.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#97

Post by McAlpine5892 »

xelxebar wrote: post #49

This couldn't have come at a more opportune time. My 11th gen Framework just gave up the magic smoke last night, which was a frightening experience. The Framework has given me a bewildering litany of issues over the years, and I now just want something solid, light, and reasonable battery life, so just I threw down for an M4 Air today. Having used Linux exclusively for 25 years and an unaBashed CLI junkie, I'm a bit…

> How does experience with nixos-darwin compare against just VMing on top of MacOS?

Kinda depends what you want. Both work. With Nix Darwin you’ll sometimes run into packages that aren’t compatible with your system. It’s not an ND problem really - some software was just never built for Mac.

Running a VM works great too. I’m a big fan of Orbstack as it’s fairly transparent with the system. It’s nice to hop inside a real Linux box but feel like you’re working ON the actual system. You’ll take a battery hit compared to on-metal as macOS puts VMs on P-cores, but it’s not that bad.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#98

Post by TiredOfLife »

appleaday1 wrote: post #43
bee_rider wrote: post #32

Those apple chips are really quite impressive. But, AMD has those fancy APUs now, maybe it is possible to stay in x86 land a bit longer?

what apus?

All the zen 5 based ones.

https://manuals.omamix.org/3/omacom/74/good-linux-hardware

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#99

Post by lrvick »

Sytten wrote: post #21

My homebrew story is always something along the lines of: Me: Please install software A. Homebrew: In order to install it I will also install 20 libraries (some need to be built from source), update openssl, update Python and wreck all virtual environments. Also since its been a while I decided it must be time to upgrade your other unrelated packages. Enjoy!

Homebrew also takes a wikipedia style approach to package maintenance where any of hundreds of unvetted internet randos can push any unsigned changes they want to all users of that package with no review.

When you install Homebrew you are literally granting access to virtually anyone remote access to your laptop.

Any security leaders in an org that allow Homebrew on workstations used for anything remotely sensitive should be fired.

I have been restricted from disallowing it at some orgs, which is my cue to leave before a major supply chain attack is blamed on me.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#100

Post by zbentley »

Sytten wrote: post #21

My homebrew story is always something along the lines of: Me: Please install software A. Homebrew: In order to install it I will also install 20 libraries (some need to be built from source), update openssl, update Python and wreck all virtual environments. Also since its been a while I decided it must be time to upgrade your other unrelated packages. Enjoy!

As someone for whom Nix and MacPorts are a bit too much of a chore, I find that three things massively improve the Homebrew user experience:

1. If you do Python development, use “uv” or any other Python interpreter-management tool which uses precompiled Python installations from a reputable source. This removes the pain of sorting out compile dependencies for Python itself, as well as solving the “unrelated brew install command trashed all my Python virtualenvs” issue. Whether you use uv or some other Python-version-manager, I hope we can all agree that Brew-managed Python for development, as well as pyenv-compiled Python, are just garbage. As a bonus, “uv” gives you decent reproducibility on a lot of other platforms, if you ever want to develop or share your software to someone on a different version of MacOS or a different OS.

2. ‘export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1’ in all your profiles to turn off the automatic updating of unrelated dependencies. That feature is so stupid. Yes, even given security issues and changing system deps.

3. Keep MacOS updated to current minus one point version, and make sure to fully uninstall/reinstall XCode/XCode CLT every time you update MacOS, and then check “brew doctor” every time you do. I’ve had far too many “brew decides to build from source” situations that boil down to Homebrew detecting my OS or build chain as not up to date with the last 6 months of MacOS updates, or lacking prebuilt artifacts for a very recently-released version.

None of this is a defense or indictment of Homebrew itself. I’m not commenting on whether or not this should be necessary (lord knows I’ve updated into plenty of MacOS misfeature releases just to get Homebrew working again). These are just relatively easy steps that allowed me to forget Homebrew build/install issues entirely.

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