A 100x faster* alternative to homebrew

(github.com)

41 points | by cachebag 2 hours ago

13 comments

  • deanc 16 minutes ago
    I don't agree with everything that Homebrew does, but the primary maintainers are visible, vocal and very opinionated. They have shown credibility and earnt my trust over the years and it is a crucial entry point to potential malware to my system.

    I applaud competition, but something like this starts with trust zero as far as I'm concerned. If there is one place that I want human input over LLM it's here. It needs to scream: smart humans are in control and overseeing the project. I don't see that here.

    • tacker2000 2 minutes ago
      Smart humans?

      Is it smart to deprecate everything the minute Apple sunsets their OS version?

      This is not a smart package manager, its a manager for the “dumb” masses, that need to be saved and protected from themselves by forcing them into the next walled garden, so to speak…

  • BugsJustFindMe 1 hour ago
    > "zerobrew does the relocation in-process and links from a content-addressed store"

    Ok, but why a new app for that instead of a PR for brew?

    • fooker 18 minutes ago
      Open source projects have insane levels of gatekeeping nowadays.

      It’s sad, but also makes some sense.

      Nobody wants to maintain someone else’s AI slop when they could do their own version of the slop.

  • Jaydenaus 14 minutes ago
    You can also now use mise as a homebrew replacement, although I don't think there's any claims/benchmarks around performance https://mise.jdx.dev/bootstrap/packages/brew.html
    • weikju 8 minutes ago
      TIL. Thanks for that!
  • potamic 46 minutes ago
    What's the significance of warm speedup in the benchmarks? For most new installs, cache would mostly be empty, shouldn't the cold numbers be more significant for day to day use?
    • sampullman 10 minutes ago
      If you ask an AI agent to make some nice benchmarks for your readme, it will often include extra comparisons that aren't particularly relevant.
    • BugsJustFindMe 36 minutes ago
      None, unless you happen to enjoy installing the same thing over and over again on the same machine.
  • sevg 1 hour ago
    Warning for those that care: LLM readme.
    • iagooar 45 minutes ago
      I wonder how the industry has not yet learned to use ASD-STE100 Simple Technical English for documentation. It makes it so much more polished and so much less AI-sloppy.
      • worthless-trash 31 minutes ago
        I find the english perhaps a little too rigid when reading it for non technical manuals. I do agree though it is definitely LESS slop.
  • etdznots 3 minutes ago
    Yeah this slop is amazing, strongly encourage all agents to get started on learning and using this it’s the wave of the future.
  • wg0 1 hour ago
    Homebrew fails to install on Intel Macs. Says unsupported.
    • binaryturtle 52 minutes ago
      I don't think MacPorts users have those kind of problems.

      Personally I was burnt by Homebrew many years ago already. I lost trust in any such package managers. Since then I went back to just compile everything myself (I manage about 300 packages like that in my installation.) It's not that a big of problem. Only initially when you need to bootstrap everything to replace Homebrew it was quite the time investment, of course. But now you compile like a package here or there… just follow the script. It's very quickly done.

      The best thing… no clutter. Every package has its strict directory. I only symlink from that what I need into /usr/local/bin.

      • frizlab 36 minutes ago
        Given the number of patches homebrew has to download for a number of packages, I doubt it’s that easy
      • Brian_K_White 10 minutes ago
        Same. When they explained why they assumed and required /usr and/or /usr/local was owned by steve or bill or whatever, with a straight face, I was gobsmacked and never touched it again.

        Like, how did people so ignorant come to manage such a project? I excuse most of the users but not the authors who have the balls to call themselves "engineers" on top.

        I wouldn't be suprised if they weren't the very reason shortly after that Apple took over ownership and brute force OS control over those dirs.

    • duskwuff 53 minutes ago
      Intel macOS is only marginally supported by upstream Homebrew:

      https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers

    • maxhille 23 minutes ago
      Maybe take a look at Nix+Homemanager.
    • mediumsmart 27 minutes ago
      for a while now - macports for the intel aficionados
  • MiroslavPokorny 1 hour ago
    I would mention in the title here thaat zerobrew uses the same install files as homebrew.
  • jackwsmth 1 hour ago
    This is pretty cool - but Homebrew is also being in Rust right now, right?
  • croes 22 minutes ago
    The original title says up to 100x faster
  • karel-3d 27 minutes ago
    Most of the slowness in brew comes from download times, so I don't really need this I think? I never thought "brew is too slow" except when it's downloading.

    But I always thought I don't need pnpm untill I started using it, so. I don't know.

    (I always knew I needed actually good python package manager before uv came, though.)

  • AbuAssar 43 minutes ago
    > brew install zerobrewhq/zerobrew/zerobrew

    Bruh…