Re:I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
by yberreby on Saturday July 19, 2025 @08:49PM
(#44620906)
Interesting that you had such a smooth experience. I was mainly using Homebrew on the daily between 10 and 14 years ago, so I couldn't give you specifics. My experience at the time was poor; maybe I was using it wrong. My impression from looking at recent user reports was that Homebrew's stability has continued to lag behind pacman's, but I agree that my assertion in the latter part of the excerpt you quoted was insufficiently substantiated, so I'll remove it.
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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
Interesting, thank you. That makes sense, but it is not convenient IMO.
I guess it could just be a cron job
I wouldn't recommend doing it from a cronjob, there are sometimes things that require sudo to update, breaking changes and important notes from Brew maintainers in the output. It's really important to inspect the output in order to see everything Brew doesn't consider normal.
Lately I'm running this like once every 2-3 weeks and it's still surprisingly nice to use. The problems only really manifest when you never run this "maintenance" snippet and only use the `brew install`, which will attempt to do the housekeeping stuff when you want/expect it the least.