I knew, but am surprised anyone actually uses it. Are there more of you?

I use it when working on Ubuntu/Debian LTS systems, since the Homebrew packages tend to be more significantly more up-to-date than whatever's packaged in the LTS Apt repositories.

As an added benefit, unlike apt, you don't need root to install (most) brew packages.

Have you tried https://mpr.makedeb.org/ ?

It seems like it’s made for Debian based systems, much like the AUR for Arch.

Absolutely use and love homebrew on linux. All of the fun rust-based tools that get posted here on hackernews (exa, fd, ripgrep, fzf, etc.) are all there and much more up to date than apt. Heck, I find brew is more up to date than nix in some cases.

I have been using it on an WSL/Ubuntu instance just over the last few days... for some things its pretty handy (e.g. in the context of k8s I get a more up to date version of the excellent kubectx utility via brew than apt). But for others its bit of a pain, e.g. building Python through pyenv and using OpenSSL in brew, etc.

always using brew on linux/osx, I wish they were supporting shipping binary /cask on Linux like on OSX (only recompiling)

I use it all of the time! It has a plethora of packages and they're often more up-to-date than the package manager of whatever distro I'm on (usually Debian or Amazon Linux 2).

It's been there for a while but it's done as an afterthought which can lead to cascading problems, and it isn't a great idea to use it. It stomps all over the distro's Python and is generally insecure, it's much safer to use the distro's own package managers.

I believe it came about to cater to Mac developers that don't want to bother with Linux based package managers, this becomes an easy out, but as mentioned previously, is more of an afterthought.