I tried to understand what homebrew is and why I need it on my machines. It looks like clutter? Can someone give an example of a good use case, please. Or is this just something the Bazzite devs want? The documentation is not very helpful and it doesn’t look like anyone is using it.

  • pogodem0n@lemmy.world
    7·
    19 hours ago

    Homebrew is a very popular package manager for Mac OS, but it is available on Linux, too. It installs packages without root and completely isolated (meaning no conflicts, not sandboxing) from the rest of the system.

    I use it on Fedora and in the past used it on Ubuntu derivatives to install packages not available in distro repositories (such as starship).

    It can also be used in old LTS distros to have newer versions of packages (for example, I used it to download latest version of neovim on Pop!_OS).

    You can also use it to avoid layering small packages to the base image (which extends update times) on Bazzite and similar distros.

    • dentacle@bookwyr.meOPEnglish
      3·
      19 hours ago

      And this is…safe? I know we do things now different on immutable distros, but I’m used to the old repo-thing where I had at least a little bit of control over the supply chain. Now it’s just “hey we download something from somewhere, it’s cool ,trust us”?

      • pogodem0n@lemmy.world
        3·
        19 hours ago

        Homebrew itself and the packages it downloads are all on GitHub. So, I guess it is safe. Still, it is probably best to stick with trusted packages and not download random stuff from there.

  • Eat_Your_Paisley@lemmy.world
    2·
    19 hours ago

    Its right there in the link, it’s a package manager. Its got lots if open source packages and you don’t need to be root to install them.

  • TagMeInSkipIGotThis@lemmy.nz
    4·
    19 hours ago

    Its another way/place to install apps from. There are some things that don’t have a flatpak but you can install with homebrew, i’m not sure but I would guess TUI/CLI based apps will have a better selection from homebrew.

    IIRC was originally a way to bring the ability to install packages on MacOS, but its also pretty useful for linux.

      • dentacle@bookwyr.meOPEnglish
        4·
        19 hours ago

        My problem at the moment is: where does all that come from? It downloads some stuff from somewhere and I have zero control?

        I know this is a little bit silly, but I’m old and I was used to have at least a little bit of influence onn my repos and package managers. Now it looks like there is so much going on in the background that I feel uncomfortable again (actually why I switched from Windows).

        • warmaster@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 hours ago

          There’s a video on YouTube where Jorge Castro (Ublue Dev) talks about how it works. He also posted this recently.

          But in short, it’s like Flathub for CLI apps: apps get publicly built, community audited, signed, and distributed. When installed, they remain isolated from your base OS, they can’t break your system.

          Similar in some way to F-DROID too.

          What’s really cool about flatpak and brew is that you can see the package build history in Github, and the community is very big because every dev on Mac is using it.

          The amount of packages available is insane.

          I use:

          • GhostScript
          • LittleCMS
          • ImageMagick
          • Pandoc

          All work like if they were native packages. It’s great.