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0 pointsvladvasiliu11mo ago0 comments

When I used to daily drive a mac, I had Macports since day one, with no issue I can remember. This lasted for some 14 years, out of which 8 were on the same machine.

Whenever this kind of discussion comes up around these parts, you can bet on there being a bunch of people complaining about Brew, but Macports basically never comes up.

So I have to wonder: why does everyone use Brew? Does it have features or other advantages which Macports doesn't? Is macports no longer a thing (I've stopping using macs around 2021)? This reminds me of people complaining about what a crappy experience Windows is, but never even contemplating moving to something else.

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JadeNB11mo ago

I also used to use Macports exclusively (and Fink before that!). For me the reason behind the switch, after resisting it a long time, was simple: everything I used from Macports was also in Homebrew, but I just kept running into things I wanted to install that were in Homebew but not in Macports.

eviks11mo ago

> Whenever this kind of discussion comes up around these parts, you can bet on there being a bunch of people complaining about Brew, but Macports basically never comes up.

Macports comes up all the time, just like you've mentioned it here. It has a few user friendly benefits (no sudo, more up-to-date apps, better gui clients, slightly easier to add custom package, etc), but in general hard to say exactly why one app wins

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