> I bet you don’t use the graphical installer on your Mac though do you?
Your mind reading skills are terrible. I'm not sure who or what gave you that impression.
EDIT:
Again, from the node site, clicking on install with package manager, both windows and osx lead off with "simply download the installer" before listing alternatives.
Its been the defacto standard for package management for a while, and it works on top of the base OS thanks to /usr/local having priority in $PATH
> What about python? You have to replace the built-in one don’t you?
If Python 2.7.10 doesn't suit your needs, yes.
$ /usr/bin/python --version
Python 2.7.10
$ /usr/local/bin/python2 --version
Python 2.7.15
$ /usr/local/bin/python3 --version
Python 3.6.5
Same with Bash:
$ /bin/bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin17)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
$ /usr/local/bin/bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.4.19(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin17.3.0)
Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
With Python it is a bit annoying with variables but other than that not a big deal. I started out with Bash v2 so that's my reference point. Sometimes its annoying for portability reasons.
Rumor is Apple doesn't like GPLv3. I don't see it as a big problem but that is thanks to the efforts of Homebrew package maintainers.
> Its been the defacto standard for package management
While I agree that it's a standard for package management, I don't think that using a package manager is the defacto standard. I've yet to see any onboarding docs that use brew install, for the reasons I stated parallel to your comment.
The major reason I don't use homebrew and don't recommend it is because it's an absolute pain to use a version manager due to where brew stores its binary files.
I don't use python very frequently, so I don't really think much about it much when installing. I'm pretty sure I installed it with anaconda, but can't remember. As I mentioned above I doubt I used brew for the same reason.
I typically only use brew for installing linux commands that are absent from osx or for one-off uses of something random. Looking at my brew list, it's things like phantomjs or rethinkdb. I'll uninstall them with brew and use their installer if I actually end up using them.
Why is that? What do you do instead?