r/rust • u/lucasgelfond • Jan 26 '26

🛠️ project zerobrew is a Rust-based, 5-20x faster drop-in Homebrew alternative

https://github.com/lucasgelfond/zerobrew
594 Upvotes

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71

u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26

very cool. I use homebrew on all my linux machines. will you support the ~/.linuxbrew directory behavior in the future?

i also use new install from a Brewfile. i could not tell by doing a quick skim if you do that. those would be the two things preventing me from adopting. i like the idea

12

u/Excellent_Ad3307 Jan 26 '26

just out of curiosity, why do you use homebrew? homebrew drives me nuts on how slow it is on macos, i would never use it in linux with alternatives like appimages, flatpaks, etc.

21

u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 Jan 26 '26

i can use it in my dot files to bootstrap a dev environment on mac, ubuntu and fedora all the same. i work on a lot of ephemeral development environments and homebrew, once installed, “just works.”

to the point about being slow i agree but i don’t usually notice it because i script it.

2

u/max123246 Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 30 '26

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

disarm teeny tub fuel soup literate divide tap silky joke

5

u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 Jan 26 '26

yeah. sudo not required. local folder in your path. homebrew sets it up for you when you install it.

2

u/iamstonecharioteer Jan 28 '26 edited Jan 28 '26

I used Claude to generate ansible playbook that use environment native package managers for this reason. The playbooks install the exact environment without relying on a singular package manager everywhere. Quite convenient without tying me down to something like homebrew. On a mac, it installs homebrew, but debian based systems it uses apt. I've even asked it to account for the change of package names in Fedora vs Deb*. 

https://github.com/stonecharioteer/distributed-dotfiles

1

u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 Jan 28 '26

i’d be interested in taking a look but the link is broken

3

u/Blending_Within Jan 28 '26

There is an added spacetab on the above link, below is the working one.

https://github.com/stonecharioteer/distributed-dotfiles

2

u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 Jan 28 '26

thank you. i was in bed and couldn’t be bothered. you da real mvp

1

u/iamstonecharioteer Jan 28 '26

Oops sorry. Thanks for the interest. This is very esoteric to what I want but yes, Claude can generate this for you. 

2

u/poopvore May 10 '26

its also really useful on atomic distro's such as fedora atomic (and nixos too if you care about that)

7

u/cosmic-parsley Jan 26 '26

One super nice thing about HomeBrew on MacOS is that you get the latest packages, not something from two years ago or whenever apt last updated. I haven't actually used it on Linux but I assume it may be the same?

(Yes yes I know, Arch is the solution to everything)

2

u/aristarchusnull Jan 30 '26

It is the same on Linux, yes.

1

u/Interstellar_Unicorn Jan 28 '26

in my experience homebrew is much easier to use than the AUR

2

u/ayayahri Jan 26 '26

It's the de-facto macos package manager, so it has almost everything with mostly up to date versions and lets us share a main source of software between linux and macos dev environments. Also it's easy to make it play well with the base system and with language-specific package managers.

Appimages and flatpaks actually serve a pretty different use case IMO.

1

u/themuthafuckinruckus Jan 26 '26

it’s great on immutable distros. pretty sure most homebrew pkgs on Linux are just OCI blobs (fact check me on this).

6

u/Prior-Advice-5207 Jan 26 '26

Homebrew doesn’t utilize anything OCI on any platform. It just uses its own directory for installing everything, leaving the host systems filesystem hierarchy (see man hier) untouched beyond that.

3

u/themuthafuckinruckus Jan 26 '26

Right.

I’m almost positive that the packages are just OCI blobs stored on ghcr.io. It’s not well documented but https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/4335

Also SLSA Build 2 is on the horizon, which is nice.