I’m using nix-portable in some cases to run some tools which I describe a bit at Nix installation is gone after getting Fedora 42 - #3 by jcrben
Definitely not a huge fan of homebrew, altho I’ve used it for a long time and still do for a few small things. But for some projects it wants to pull in a ton of dependencies which just gets messy.
For example, if I install gopass, homebrew will install all these dependencies:
==> Installing dependencies for gopass: ca-certificates, gmp, libunistring, libidn2, libtasn1, nettle, libffi, p11-kit, openssl@3, libevent, libnghttp2, expat, unbound, zlib, gnutls, libgpg-error, libassuan, libgcrypt, libksba, bzip2, pcre2, dbus, ncurses, readline, libxcrypt, sqlite, util-linux, mpdecimal, xz, lz4, zstd, berkeley-db@5, libedit, unzip, python@3.14, glib, libcap, systemd, libusb, npth, libsecret, pinentry, keyutils, krb5, cyrus-sasl, openldap and gnupg
And if I uninstall gopass, it will try to automatically remove all of them, but in some cases they may leave leftover artifacts - for example you’ll get messages like this:
Uninstalling /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar/ca-certificates/2025-12-02... (4 files, 236KB)
Warning: The following ca-certificates configuration files have not been removed!
If desired, remove them manually with `rm -rf`:
/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/etc/ca-certificates
/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/etc/ca-certificates/cert.pem
I find it just messy and confusing. I use nix-portable to run gopass and all its dependencies are self-contained inside the nix system. Granted, all these dependencies are sort of “self-contained” in homebrew. But then I might install another thing and it might depend on gnutls - but both have to share the same version of gnutls. That sharing requirement, and lack of flexibility in running different versions side-by-side, is one of the motivations behind things like flatpak and nix to begin with.
I’m also doing some more systemsy development inside a distrobox - for now wrote a wrapper script to clean it out. Also exploring going further by doing more stuff inside an actual virtualbox - but haven’t figured out which I like best: (1) virt-manager, lima, or just quickemu.
Haven’t open-sourced my dotfiles and local set up scripts yet, would like to at some point but would need to carefully go over it - I do by default put the sensitive stuff in a separate repo but reluctant to share everything about how I work.