Having bought my iMac in September 2010, I’m still pretty new to Mac OS X. One of the first things I did back then was to install MacPorts in order to install e.g. the Gimp, Ruby and a couple of other open source software. It all worked great … but… I felt a little bit like a couple of years ago when I first installed Gentoo on my desktop. It’s all about downloading and compiling, downloading – compiling, downloading… you got it.
Installing Gimp through MacPorts took about 45 minutes… not great. Very annoying in fact.
One of the reasons I switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu was that it has a great package manager. After the MacPorts Gimp experience I was hoping there was a great quick alternative for MacPorts, too.
Turns out there is. Homebrew … The missing package manager for OS X. It’s quick, it works, no more compilation … happiness!
I'm a Software Developer, currently working at