For the computer science program at my university, I have to use a server that I don’t have root access to. The setup is very bare-bones, and I wanted to install a few of my favorite tools to make things feel more homey. I initially tried using a combination of AppImages, standalone binaries, and compiling from source, but that became complicated quickly.
It was then that I thought of Homebrew. Originally designed for macOS, the Homebrew package manager also works on Linux and can be installed either system-wide or per-user. I followed the simple installation instructions, set up shell completion, and was good to go.
I soon found myself installing Linuxbrew (as the Linux version is called) on my desktop PC as well. I needed a few utilities that were not available on the OBS or whose natively packaged versions had limited features or were outdated, but now I could simply brew install <pkg> instead of compiling the source or contemplating another distro hop. Since there are more developers on macOS than on any particular family of Linux distros, it’s pretty much a given that a command-line program is packaged for Homebrew (although GUI applications, known as casks, are macOS only right now.) It was the same feeling as when I discovered Flatpak.
While obviously designed for programmers and power users, I think there are a lot of folks in this community who might benefit from this and simply have never heard of it. Please share your thoughts.
