I’m especially concerned about it being somehow broken, unwieldy, insecure or privacy-invasive.

Case in point; at times I have to rely on a Chromium-based browser if a website decides to misbehave on a Firefox-based browser. Out of the available options I gravitate towards Brave as it seems like the least bad out of the bunch.

Unfortunately, their RPM-package leaves a lot to be desired and has multiple times just been awful to deal with. So much so that I have been using another Chromium-based browser instead that’s available directly from my distro’s repos. But…, I would still switch to Brave in an instant if Brave was found in my distro’s repos. A quick search on repology.org reveals that an up-to-date Brave is packaged in the AUR (unsurprisingly), Manjaro and Homebrew. I don’t feel like changing distros for the sake of a single program, but adding Homebrew to my arsenal of universal package managers doesn’t sound that bad. But, not all universal package managers are created equal, therefore I was interested to know how Homebrew fares compared to the others and if it handles the packaging of the browser without blemishing the capabilities of the browser’s sandbox.

P.S. I expect people to recommend me Distrobox instead. Don’t worry, I have been a staunch user of Distrobox for quite a while now. I have also run Brave through an Arch-distrobox in the past. But due to some concerns I’ve had, I chose to discontinue this. Btw, its Flatpak package ain’t bad either. But unfortunately it’s not official, so I choose to not make use of it for that reason.

  • tvcvt@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    My only experience with homebrew is on macOS and I’ve switched to MacPorts there. Homebrew did some weird permissions things I didn’t care for (chowned all of /usr/local to $USER, if I’m remembering right). It worked fine on a single user system, but seemed like a bad philosophy to me. This was years ago and I don’t know how it behaves on Linux.

    I also prefer Firefox, but when I need a Chromium alternative for testing, I opt for the flatpak (or the snap) version personally.

  • Helix 🧬@feddit.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    What does Brave give you what the other Chromium based browser doesn’t have? Maybe you can install add-ons instead?

  • Krause [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
    03·
    1 year ago

    I tried Homebrew once in a VM and didn’t like it, I felt it was too invasive.

    1. https://github.com/Homebrew/install/blob/85c5f4b57452dbd1c7ebc01a021548d2ceaf2b64/install.sh#L173

    Why does it create another user and put files under /home/linuxbrew/? Answer:

    The script installs Homebrew to its default, supported, best prefix (/opt/homebrew for Apple Silicon, /usr/local for macOS Intel and /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew for Linux) so that you don’t need sudo after Homebrew’s initial installation when you brew install.

    Where’s the logic in that? Why not just install to the user’s home directory so that you don’t even need root access in the first place?

    1. https://github.com/Homebrew/install/blob/85c5f4b57452dbd1c7ebc01a021548d2ceaf2b64/install.sh#L222

    Why is sudo hard-coded? Answer: it’s to prevent people from using doas and other sudo alternatives.

    1. https://docs.brew.sh/Installation#untar-anywhere-unsupported

    Why is installing from the tarball unsupported and so frowned upon? FFS isn’t this just supposed to be a package manager? Why is everything so complicated and opinionated when compared to pip, cargo, Flatpak, etc? Compare this mess to Golang’s install and uninstall process where you literally just need to tar -xzf a file or rm -rf a directory.