HomeBrew VS XQuartz

Compare HomeBrew vs XQuartz and see what are their differences.

HomeBrew

🍺 The missing package manager for macOS (or Linux) (by Homebrew)

XQuartz

An X11 server and client libraries for macOS (by XQuartz)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
HomeBrew XQuartz
1,281 35
39,303 748
1.5% 2.9%
10.0 6.7
4 days ago 11 months ago
Ruby Shell
BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

HomeBrew

Posts with mentions or reviews of HomeBrew. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-08.
  • Top Homebrew Alternative: ServBay Becomes the Go-To for Developers
    1 project | dev.to | 18 Apr 2024
    Homebrew is a highly popular package manager on macOS and Linux systems, enabling users to easily install, update, and uninstall command-line tools and applications. Its design philosophy focuses on simplifying the software installation process on macOS, eliminating the need for manual downloads and compilations of software packages.
  • Software Engineering Workflow
    6 projects | dev.to | 8 Apr 2024
    Homebrew - package manager for linux-based OSs.
  • Simulate your first Lightning transaction on the Bitcoin regtest network Part 1 (MacOS)
    3 projects | dev.to | 30 Mar 2024
    Package Manager: Homebrew
  • Tools for Linux Distro Hoppers
    7 projects | dev.to | 27 Mar 2024
    Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.
  • SQLite Schema Diagram Generator
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Mar 2024
    Are you using SQLite that ships with macOS, or SQLite installed from homebrew?

    I had a different problem in the past with the SQLite that ships with macOS, and have been using SQLite from homebrew since.

    So if it’s the one that comes with macOS that gives you this problem that you are having, try using SQLite from homebrew instead.

    https://brew.sh/

  • How to install (Ubuntu 22.10 VM) vagrant on Mac M1 ship using QEMU
    1 project | dev.to | 21 Mar 2024
    Before we begin, make sure you have Homebrew installed on your Mac. Homebrew is a package manager that makes it easy to install software and dependencies. You can install Homebrew by following the instructions on their website: https://brew.sh/
  • Perfect Elixir: Environment Setup
    3 projects | dev.to | 18 Mar 2024
    I’m on MacOS and erlang.org, elixir-lang.org, and postgresql.org all suggest installation via Homebrew, which is a very popular package manager for MacOS.
  • You're Installing Node.js Wrong. That's OK, Here Is How To Fix It 🙌
    2 projects | dev.to | 14 Mar 2024
    I have always either installed Node from the installer provided by the Nodejs website or, via Brew in macOS. I have also used nvm in the past but did not know that there was a best practice to guide us.
  • Test Driving a Rails API - Part One
    11 projects | dev.to | 11 Mar 2024
    A running Rails application needs a database to connect to. You may already have your database of choice installed, but if not, I recommend PostgreSQL, or Postgres for short. On a Mac, probably the easiest way to install it is with Posrgres.app. Another option, the one I prefer, is to use Homebrew. With Homebrew installed, this command will install PostgreSQL version 16 along with libpq:
  • Effective Neovim Setup. A Beginner’s Guide
    5 projects | dev.to | 9 Mar 2024
    On a macOS machine, you can use homebrew by running the command.

XQuartz

Posts with mentions or reviews of XQuartz. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-19.
  • C-Macs – a pure C macOS application
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2024
    brew install --cask xquartz

    Or install from the project homepage [1]. Then just launch the X11 app. Note that it does require the application to be built for Mac - it’s not an emulator, just an implementation of the X11 APIs.

    [1] https://www.xquartz.org/

  • Understanding Keyboard Events Better
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Dec 2023
    I’ve recently spent some time working with terminal emulators in raw mode on macOS. While I chose to handle key events using escape codes, and found it seriously difficult (even gave up) to process the shift modifier key. However, I came across xquartz [1], which seems to do similar things as mentioned in the article. Would detecting shift key state have been trivial using such a library?

    [1] https://github.com/XQuartz/XQuartz

  • Audacity 3.4 – New Musical Features
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Nov 2023
    The contents are rendered through gtk/cairo which not only goes through https://www.xquartz.org/ but also doesn't use GPU rendering (it was experimental 3 years ago, maybe better now). The main issue seems to be that neither Inkscape nor gtk people have much low level Darwin experts or time available to invest in debugging the whole rendering stack. See for example https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/1614 and all the other referenced issues for all the gory details.
  • ksh88 string substitution in alias | mpv streaming
    1 project | /r/openbsd | 2 Nov 2023
    I live in a mezzanine studio using a M1 macbook for a workstation (writing/editing) and my old laptop with openbsd as a local server. I play music from that obsd server upstairs, which thus fills the whole room down to my desktop through the plugged-in speakers. My hosted library plays fine with mpd and ncmpcpp, and I just figured out it's not so difficult to use mpv to play streamed youtube videos, since firefox in XQuartz streaming from xenocara is way too slow anyhow.
  • Back to Emacs - I have some questions
    1 project | /r/emacs | 9 Jul 2023
    There is an alternative: I ended up using Xquartz to give me an X11 environment and then running StumpWM as my tiling window manager. I used this for all my productive stuff, running full screen in MacOS, then a quick keypress got me back to the Mac environment.
  • Red Hat considers Xorg “deprecated” and will remove it in the next RHEL
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 May 2023
  • Which mac should I get for study?
    1 project | /r/mac | 22 Mar 2023
    I also used Xquartz. Emacs was better for me though because capturing text output and documenting what I captured was so much easier than X-window.
  • Does Wine work on mac at all?
    1 project | /r/winehq | 15 Mar 2023
    Link
  • how to ssh from linux or windows to mac os with x11?
    1 project | /r/commandline | 15 Mar 2023
  • Do most people just run zsh, or is it common to switch to bash?
    1 project | /r/mac | 4 Mar 2023
    I used a Mac for router software testing for over 20 years. I ran a shell on my mac either through Emacs (on occasion) or X-quartz with terminal connections to a dozen or more routers, linux and or Windows systems. In all that time, I opened the terminal on my mac maybe 5 times.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing HomeBrew and XQuartz you can also consider the following projects:

spack - A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.

homebrew-zathura - Homebrew formulae to build Zathura on Mac OS X

asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more

cage - A Wayland kiosk

Visual Studio Code - Visual Studio Code

Docker-OSX - Run macOS VM in a Docker! Run near native OSX-KVM in Docker! X11 Forwarding! CI/CD for OS X Security Research! Docker mac Containers.

winget-cli - WinGet is the Windows Package Manager. This project includes a CLI (Command Line Interface), PowerShell modules, and a COM (Component Object Model) API (Application Programming Interface).

i3ass - A collection of shell scripts to ease the use of i3wm

osxfuse - FUSE extends macOS by adding support for user space file systems

pass-import - A pass extension for importing data from most existing password managers

Chocolatey - Chocolatey - the package manager for Windows

Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]