The MacPorts project has existed for 7 years longer than Homebrew, and is a much more sane experience similar to FreeBSD ports. In fact, Jordan Hubbard, the co-founder of FreeBSD and the original author of FreeBSD ports, was involved in the MacPorts project (along with other Apple employees).
I’m always baffled that Homebrew is seen as the standard macOS package manager. MacPorts has existed for many more years. It behaves more similarly to package managers on other operating systems without weird symlink tricks. It doesn’t send analytics to Google. It has over 25,000 active ports (Homebrew doesn’t seem to publish its formulae count but SO threads seem to indicate something in the region of 4,000). To each their own, but I highly recommend anyone reading this to give MacPorts a try.
Macports is great and better than homebrew. But it’s an add on, with no (official) support from Apple. Apt is first party, WSL is first party. Debian and Microsoft won’t make breaking changes intentionally that impact those systems. This happens regularly with homebrew and Apple. (Macports having a more independent universe in /opt and being less vulnerable to breakage is partly why I prefer it. Although it still takes a dependency on Xcode cli tools last I looked.)
I tried MacPorts back in the day and royally screwed up my computer and couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Iirc, homebrew symlinking prevents what happened to me.
However, I’ve learned a lot since that time, so perhaps macports would work just fine for me now.
Second vote for Macports. It's awesome, and filed some bugs during the Big Sur beta, they all got triaged and processed really fast with new package releases only days later.
I’m always baffled that Homebrew is seen as the standard macOS package manager. MacPorts has existed for many more years. It behaves more similarly to package managers on other operating systems without weird symlink tricks. It doesn’t send analytics to Google. It has over 25,000 active ports (Homebrew doesn’t seem to publish its formulae count but SO threads seem to indicate something in the region of 4,000). To each their own, but I highly recommend anyone reading this to give MacPorts a try.