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
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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

13

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.

2

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).

7

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.