Tried to install a package with it, it failed.
Tried the same package with brew. Worked like a charm.
Uninstalled nanobrew.
Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
111–120 of 156 posts
Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
#112Brew is a leaky piece of crap. nix 4 lyf. Seriously, I used to hate any time I needed to install something with brew not knowing if it was going to break everything else, since using nixpkgs for my macos dev requirements it's been so much nicer.
Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the reasons I switched to arch from debian based distros was precisely how much faster pacman was compared to APT -- system updates shouldn't take over half an hour when I have a (multi)gigabit connection and an SSD. It was mostly precipitated by when containers came in and I was honestly shocked at how fast apk installs packages on alpine compared to my Ubuntu boxes (using apt)
pacman is faster simply because it does less things and it supports less use cases. For example pacman does not need to validate the system for partial upgrades because those are unsupported on Arch and if the system is borked then it’s yours to fix.
Less charitably, pacman is fast because it's wrong. The dependency resolver is wrong; it fails to find correct answers to dependency resolution problems even when correct answers are available.
Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since I enabled HOMEBREW_DOWNLOAD_CONCURRENCY, downloads have improved for me to the point where download speed is no longer an issue.
If your version is 5.0.0 or newer, concurrency is already active by default. https://brew.sh/2025/11/12/homebrew-5.0.0/
Thanks for that. And here I was somehow hanging around on 4.5.3.
Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Context for those unaware: the commenter, mikemcquaid, is the project lead for Homebrew.
Thank you, his arguments totally makes sense, only the part that makes me icky is: > There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks. People are free and probably do this because it is slow. Alternatives often are not a bad thing.
> People are free and probably do this because it is slow. Alternatives often are not a bad thing.
Alternatives are always good but IMO brew is just not something I interact with all that much and to me it's "good enough". It works and does what I expect, although to be fair maybe I'm on the happy path .
Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
#116What would be great is a Homebrew-compatible system that doesn't cut off support for older machines. I have a 3.8 GHz Quad core i5 iMac that still crushes, yet Homebrew has determined that I'm just too old and icky[1] to work with anymore. I had to move over to MacPorts, which is surprisingly nice, but I still miss brew. Yea, I know. It's open source. They can do what they want. Still sucks. 1: https://docs.brew.sh/S…
To be fair, Apple stopped providing security fixes for Mojave ~4+ years ago, and there have been 7 or 8 new os releases since then… I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect an open source project to support everything
True, but I think you still want to avoid Homebrew if you're interested in older Mac versions. A specific project might have some support for the version you're interested in. For example, the Go 1.23 toolchain (which isn't the latest version) supports Mac releases back to Big Sur.
Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is really coll that Homebrew provides a comprehensive enough JSON API to let people build on Homebrew in useful ways without directly running Ruby, despite everything being built in a Ruby DSL. That really does seem like a "best of both worlds" deal, and it's cool that alternative clients can take advantage of that. I didn't know about the pending, official Rust frontend! That's very interesting.
Wow they are finally getting away from Ruby? Awesome. The speed will be a nice boon
Is Ruby really the speed bottleneck in Homebrew? I would assume it would be due to file operations (and download operations), not choice of programming language.
Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
#118If it doesn’t ever execute Ruby: it cannot be compatible with Homebrew. “Compatible” is doing a bit of work here when it also means “implicitly relies on Homebrew’s CDN, CI, packaging infrastructure and maintainers who keep all this running”. There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks. Homebrew is working on an official Rust frontend that will actually hav…
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Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
#119I've found brew so painful that I switched to nix. Nix unfortunately is painful in its own way. However, I recently discovered devbox which is a wrapper around nix. It works really well as a package manager. Just run "devbox global add "
Re: Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I don't know why people are saying that speed doesn't matter. I use Homebrew and it is slow. It's like yum vs apt in the Linux world. APT (C++) is fast and yum (Python) was slow. Both work fine, but yum would just add a few seconds, or a minute, of little frustrations multiple times a day. It adds up. They finally fixed it with dnf (C++) and now yum is deprecated. Glad to hear a Rust rewrite is coming to Homebre…
> Yeah I don't know why people are saying that speed doesn't matter. I use Homebrew and it is slow Because how often are you running it where it's not anything but a opportunity to take a little breather in a day? And I do mean little, the speedups being touted here are seconds. I have the same response to the obsession with boot times, how often are you booting your machine where it is actually impacting anything? H…
This. There are much better reasons to abandon brew than “it’s slow”.