I disagree with the first sentence:

    > The linux package managers are significantly better than homebrew/macports

I think homebrew has an infinitely better UI than apt-get (I use both OS X and Ubuntu full-time at work, OS X and Arch at home). Where the Linux package managers are better is stability; homebrew doesn't have rigid enough testing practices to support the aggressiveness in which they update packages. But that falls on the devs and not the tool.

EDIT:

It seems that people think I meant "GUI" when I said UI. I strictly meant User Interface; in this case, the command line is the front-end to the user interface. I feel that homebrew has a better CLI than things like apt-get or pacman.

After using os x for a bit w/homebrew, I'd sum it up like this:

OS X has a design philosophy of simplicity for the average user. Putting commom settings into guis, and having the more complex ones in terminal. Homebrew follows this. Its great for installing, removing, and searching, but if you want to do something complex have fun.

Desktop Linux distros caters to the power user. Its idea is why have lots of GUIs which hide the 'advanced configuration', and instead uses command line. Lots of UX design has gone into these commands to insure that they remain simple enough.

Finally windows on the other hand decided to avoid the terminal at all costs. They decided to put every single setting into a gui with little consideration on what the 'average' user will use.

Try wajig:

Description: simple and unified package management for Debian Wajig is a single commandline wrapper around apt, apt-cache, dpkg, /etc/init.d scripts and more, intended to be easy to use and providing extensive documentation for all of its functions.

Can you provide some examples of where you think homebrew has a better UI than apt-get? I can't think of anything in homebrew which feels significantly easier than apt-get or yum.

`brew search` + `brew info` is about a million times more sane than `apt-cache show`, which I find sucks (is usually too aggressive or too specific in its fuzzy matching) and is poorly named. Plus, why the hell have apt-get and apt-cache separated in to two commands? Insane.

The output of a `brew install` command is much easier to parse than the output of a `apt-get install` command. So is the output of a `--dry-run`.

The UI for dependency conflict resolution in `apt-get` is bizarre. And the one in `aptitude` isn't much better.

I also like that brew is built on git. This is part of the UI for managing versions (the other being the semi-undocumented and unpublicized `brew switch` command), and `brew` is a lot more understanding of being able to switch between versions of packages on the fly.

Sure, apt-get is crap but there are other package management UIs on Linux such as zypper which are fantastic.

Have you used synaptic?

Used it once.....yeah

I was asking dljsjr to find out what (s)he prefers in the homebrew ui over synaptic. Synaptic just gets things done without getting in the way.

See my comment about clarifying UI vs GUI.

If you really want to build from source, there is always Gentoo as well.

portage also supports custom packages in additional port trees similar to homebrew.