That reminds me of another thing I disliked about macs. An open question: who is in charge? Macports? Fink? I couldn't pick one, because neither one had what I wanted.
I think Homebrew is fairly new. If it works, I'm glad, but it didn't exist a few years back. So, a disclaimer I should have included in my original post: things might have changed in the past year.
The package manager I found useful was virtualbox + apt-get.
MacPorts and Fink both annoy me. Not because they are bad but because they are "so close but so far." I end up mostly compiling stuff manually and managing /usr/local with GNU Stow. Which is frustrating because so many mac installers seem to want to install stuff into /usr/local. I've learned to unpack the installer and install it manually so my beautiful stow-ness isn't compromised.
I think Homebrew is fairly new. If it works, I'm glad, but it didn't exist a few years back. So, a disclaimer I should have included in my original post: things might have changed in the past year.
The package manager I found useful was virtualbox + apt-get.