I switched from Homebrew to Macports, although I may switch back.
Basically, Homebrew will completely crap out on you if you are ever more than two macOS versions out of date. The brew people simply don't keep the older bottles around for those versions of macOS. I think there's a grace period of like one extra version, but eventually they will delete it. Once that happens, your system is hosed if you ever need to install any new packages from Homebrew ever again. You will only be able to install from source, and it's a tossup if that will work.
This is a fairly controversial Homebrew policy and lots of people have complained about it, and there's lots of rhetoric on both sides. My stance: while it's a good idea in general to stay up to date, if you are the kind that likes to keep old legacy machines around to do a few things here and there, you should know your Homebrew installation will eventually break if you don't keep updating the OS. You will eventually not want to do when the system gets old enough, and at that point Homebrew will be a mess.
I'm not interested in the debate as I get both sides, particularly involving security concerns. My experience: simply put, Homebrew's policy will cause you to have to sideline your system, or at least work around this really tedious roadblock, while it still has a good amount of life in it. I wish they kept old bottles around a few years longer, because 2-3 years is not long enough.
So I said that on my current system, which I do keep current, I'm going to not use Homebrew at all. I figured I'd use Macports, since one of the big selling points is that it works on older versions, so I won't eventually run into this problem five years from now. So I did.
The main problem is that there just aren't anywhere near as many packages as there are on Homebrew. Homebrew has become a standard for all kinds of stuff, and if there's ever a package you want on Homebrew, and it's not on Macports, what do you do? You will run into this when using Macports all the time. I've also had issues using Macports with M1; I don't remember the details but there was some weirdness I ran into one point having to configure it to set the architecture correctly on some package I was trying to install. I'm not quite sure how that compares to brew, though, since I haven't tried brew on M1.
So the net result of all of this is, I have a bunch of installation setup scripts that I moved from Homebrew to Macports, and then half of the packages just weren't on Macports, so I had to write scripts to just download those things from elsewhere - GitHub, website installers, whatever.
So now I'm debating moving back to brew. On the one hand, it just has everything, and Macports doesn't. On the other hand, it will eventually break, and Macports isn't that bad - has basic terminal commands I need and so on. I'm on the fence. If there were some user-maintained repository of legacy bottles for brew I'd move back to that.
Portfiles are definitely a little more outré than brew's Ruby, but I've found it's not too hard to make one for a tool by starting from another similar existing port. You get the contents of the example one with `port cat $existing_tool`, tweak it, and then add it to a local port repo: https://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.local-reposit... And then you can just `sudo port install $new_tool`
Basically, Homebrew will completely crap out on you if you are ever more than two macOS versions out of date. The brew people simply don't keep the older bottles around for those versions of macOS. I think there's a grace period of like one extra version, but eventually they will delete it. Once that happens, your system is hosed if you ever need to install any new packages from Homebrew ever again. You will only be able to install from source, and it's a tossup if that will work.
This is a fairly controversial Homebrew policy and lots of people have complained about it, and there's lots of rhetoric on both sides. My stance: while it's a good idea in general to stay up to date, if you are the kind that likes to keep old legacy machines around to do a few things here and there, you should know your Homebrew installation will eventually break if you don't keep updating the OS. You will eventually not want to do when the system gets old enough, and at that point Homebrew will be a mess.
I'm not interested in the debate as I get both sides, particularly involving security concerns. My experience: simply put, Homebrew's policy will cause you to have to sideline your system, or at least work around this really tedious roadblock, while it still has a good amount of life in it. I wish they kept old bottles around a few years longer, because 2-3 years is not long enough.
So I said that on my current system, which I do keep current, I'm going to not use Homebrew at all. I figured I'd use Macports, since one of the big selling points is that it works on older versions, so I won't eventually run into this problem five years from now. So I did.
The main problem is that there just aren't anywhere near as many packages as there are on Homebrew. Homebrew has become a standard for all kinds of stuff, and if there's ever a package you want on Homebrew, and it's not on Macports, what do you do? You will run into this when using Macports all the time. I've also had issues using Macports with M1; I don't remember the details but there was some weirdness I ran into one point having to configure it to set the architecture correctly on some package I was trying to install. I'm not quite sure how that compares to brew, though, since I haven't tried brew on M1.
So the net result of all of this is, I have a bunch of installation setup scripts that I moved from Homebrew to Macports, and then half of the packages just weren't on Macports, so I had to write scripts to just download those things from elsewhere - GitHub, website installers, whatever.
So now I'm debating moving back to brew. On the one hand, it just has everything, and Macports doesn't. On the other hand, it will eventually break, and Macports isn't that bad - has basic terminal commands I need and so on. I'm on the fence. If there were some user-maintained repository of legacy bottles for brew I'd move back to that.