For me it's a package manager that does not require a compile every time I want to install something.

edit: also macports seems fragile too.

Ah, macports is a bit fragile, yes :) I'm pretty happy with homebrew, however (for the most part). Plus writing formulas for homebrew is really easy.

+1 on Homebrew. I had both fink and MacPorts running at one time. Homebrew is more pleasant in every respect (my opinion, of course).

I liked homebrew until I needed pygtk. I don't know of any good way to install that but with macports and boy is it a pain to install without a package manager. And once I needed macports. I also like to have a recent version of gcc. This also required macports.

Homebrew is great. Macports is good, too, if you like seeing which programs will segfault due to the version of OpenSSL it currently includes.

Homebrew is great, but it's quite annoying that one day Apple decides to drop straight gcc from Xcode, making many Formulae uncompilable. Yes, you can install an older Xcode first, or use a 3rd party gcc build. But in Linux distributions such as Debian, they'd just keep 'deprecated' things around for some time

I like Homebrew but I wish there was something like porticus for it (a way to browse and install available packages) - unless I am just missing something.

I miss Apt from Debian.

And I really, really miss being able to get *-dev packages.

Can't you run XMonad on a mac? I'm pretty sure a couple people I know do just that. (There might be some wrangling and virtual machines, but I doubt it.)

You can run XMonad on a Mac, but it will only tile X11 apps, not standard OS X apps, which unfortunately makes it fairly useless for me.

And of course, working in a VM with it is always an option (and I have a VM setup with it for when I want to drop back into linux).

Does that include Chrome? Because I've definitely seen them use Chrome, and it looked Mac OS-y. Of course, the people I'm thinking of probably have a different outlook on OS X: they like it, but not the UI. (That's a paraphrase from one of them:)).

I've fiddled with xmonad on the mac, and as someone else said it only tiles X11 apps. This is not totally useless as I primarily like xmonad for controlling terminal windows, so I set it up to manage urxvt instances. I used xmonad.layout.gaps to make it avoid my dock area (I like my dock on the left, and I like to have the dock even when xmonad is around) and it seems to work well but the configuration breaks in subtle ways (doesn't start up sometimes, etc). I haven't put any more time into figuring it out. I might just go the VM route to get my xmonad fix. If Lion's x11.app had true Lion fullscreen support it might work better, but it doesn't yet.

I missed apt-get a teeny tiny bit but Homebrew is amazing. I'm not really into customizing my system all that much either so it wasn't that either. It's Lion that has me a little upset.

First off, Lion has replaced GCC with LLVM which for the most part is fine but I was doing some work with Ruby that I started on my Linux machine then when I cloned it on my Mac (which is where I do the majority of my work) I had problems with Rubygems and RVM. This was due to me having the latest Xcode 4.2. I was getting a weird Posix error because some gems needed to be compiled with GCC. So then I had to remove Xcode, get GCC as a standalone install and I'm still stuck with errors. Most things work but the other day I just wanted to deploy a new Octopress blog and rake generate throws a long list of errors at me. So that was the first time I was truly upset with Mac.

Then the other little things are:

- inability to save or rename files without a name (as in .htaccess). I always have to open my main text editor for that as you can't rename files that way nor does TextEdit allow that

- no more "Save as"

Showing hidden files got a little harder too and then there were some general quirks that made it seem like the OS was babysitting me and not letting me just do what I knew I wanted to do. For the most part I'm over those and I love my Mac to death but I'm still pissd about how much of a chore it is to get RVM and Runygems working in Lion.

AFAIK Xcode still ships with gcc, even though llvm-gcc is default. I regularly use "brew install --use-gcc" for things that don't work with llvm-gcc.

I believe rake should allow you to specify a C compiler on the command line. Even if it doesn't, you can temporarily change your CC environment variable to point to the gcc binary instead of llvm-gcc and things will probably work. Probably.

No, it's not included anymore, though you might still have it as a result of upgrading from an older version of Xcode.

More information is in the Homebrew issue:

https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/6852

I thought the same thing and while it should work like that it doesn't. I've gone through specifying the compiler, making a symbolic link to GCC, messing with my bash_profile... there's just a lot of problems. I'm probably going to have to do a clean install of Lion as getting things to all work involves a fragile, and very specific Procedure I think I've found.