Yeah, but it's got a much smaller set of packages available and, last I checked, had a lot more issues with broken packages and things like that (I assume because there are fewer eyes on it, and way less total time spent on maintenance of it)

Are there any packages that exist on Brew, but not, say, APT or pacman?

On macOS brew? Yeah, tons. To even get somewhat close with Ubuntu or Debian you'd have to add a bunch of non-standard package repositories, and because of the way most Linux distros tie up user-facing programs with system releases, you'd have to do similar to stay up-to-date on packages that are in the default repos.

Arch does much better, but a quick search of ones I guessed might be missing turned up the following missing, from what I have installed on my Mac:

- rolldice

- android studio (package name android-studio in homebrew)

- tealdeer

- heroku (these are the Heroku command line tools)

- sublime text (package name: sublime)

- postman

- slack

Maybe you can add other repos to get them on there, but I usually just guess the package name and get what I want. I don't think I have a single thing on my Mac, as far as software I directly use (not project dependencies), that I didn't install with Homebrew, aside from first-party Apple software (Pages, Numbers, Safari, Xcode, Mail, and so on). And that's not bringing up all the Mac-only software I've installed with it, which obviously wouldn't be fair.

I haven't added a single extra repo. That's just with the defaults. You used to have to do a one-time invocation to enable binary-only packages (mostly closed-source stuff) and then use a different keyword for operating with them, but that's no longer the case and hasn't been for IIRC at least a year—it's all transparent. "brew install [guess at package name]" works almost every time I need it, and a "brew search" finds the rare failures. I basically never need to open a browser to find & download software, and it's all up-to-date, and it's all totally separate from my base system so is extremely unlikely to ruin my morning because I ran a blanket update-everything-to-latest and didn't pay enough attention.

Fwiw, all of those except rolldice are in Nixpkgs, and you can also use Nix on top of any Linux distribution, separate from the base system, just like you use brew separate from the base system on macOS. Nix on top of Ubuntu, for example, would support all those packages. You won't like the CLI though

PS: Debian has > 3x as many packages as Arch[1]. It would surprise me very much if that was just a matter of things being more split up in Debian, or Debian's higher count of virtual packages. When people talk about Arch's great selection of packages, they're including the AUR, which is actually massive. Imo it makes more sense, then, to include the AUR in little tests like this.

—

1: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/total

The AUR[1] has rolldice, Android Studio, tealdeer, Heroku, Sublime Text, Slack and Postman.

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org

Ah, I just searched the default repos. Thanks for the clarification, I missed AUR.

Default repos don't seem to carry a lot of those (no big surprise), but the AUR seems happy to serve them. All of the apps you listed are available there, presumably because it would be a bad idea to force people to build things from the primary repos. It's honestly a nice distinction, considering one of the main complaints I've heard from Homebrew users is that it's painful having binaries and build scripts mixed in.