Come on homebrew is awesome. Install is easy and then you just point brew bundle to file with everything you need, go for coffe and your computer is ready.
That’s not really the same because Firefox isn’t a core part of an OS and Safari is actually a pretty decent browser in its own right.
Whereas a package manager should be a core part of an OS (just as it is on any other UNIX-like OS) and OSX is, in my personal opinion, crippled without running homebrew (or similar)
> Come on homebrew is awesome. Install is easy and then you just point brew bundle to file with everything you need, go for coffe and your computer is ready.
Homebrew is ok. It’s not the best example of a package manager out there but it does it’s job well. However my point wasn’t about homebrew specifically but rather that OSX should have been built with a proper package manager from the outset. And no, the App Store doesn’t count because that’s completely inadequate in almost every department.
Apple would disagree. They quite clearly believe that all software should be able to fit inside their sandboxed app store model. I think they're completely wrong about this, but that's beside the point.
My biggest gripe with OSX is that the default way of installing software is via manual downloading. Sure OSX has the AppStore, but that’s mostly garbage. Homebrew is a hell of a lot better but it’s frustrating that I have to install a 3rd party package manager on a modern OS.
I get your rant about shared libraries but you can get around those problems surprisingly easily (eg you can ship your SOs in the package directory like you might with DLLs in Windows. Or you could just statistically compile your binaries and do away without the SO problem entirely). Problems with SOs are something you’d expect a junior Linux sysadmin to learn so any developer or maintainer worth their salt should have already figured this out.