>> Linux users might laugh at us...

> Why?

As a mostly exclusive user of GNU+Linux for the past 9 years who started using a Mac last year because it was issued to me by my employer:

because Homebrew lacks many of the strengths of the kinds of package managers you find in the Linux ecosystem.

It only half-installs some packages, leaving you to manually link things in to certain directories (it was like this with Varnish a few months ago, and maybe still is). It's generally nondeterministic. Huge parts of it are basically scripted installation of preexisting binary packages, putting it more on par with Chocolatey or yaourt than a tool like apt backed by proper repos with source packages.

More on the topic of fonts in particular, there are tons of reasons that Apple's font handling, especially but not only in terms of installation and configuration management, is an embarrassment. macOS lacks configurable font substitutions, so extended characters like those provided in the ‘nerd fonts’ can only appear in applications which can be explicitly configured to use those fonts. Certain fonts are considered ‘required’ parts of the system, so that to modify or remove them on a Mac you have to disable System Integrity Protection, and a whole host of apps will simply crash on startup if, e.g., the Apple Color Emoji font is missing. macOS ignores emoji embedded in fonts that the user has chosen, and instead always injects the Apple emoji. Font rendering in macOS and iOS has been the source of numerous crashing and freezing issues of such a similar kind to one another that it is somewhat surprising and interesting that the entire class of such bugs wasn't fixed after the first major incident (as has been discussed on Hacker News recently).

Homebrew is also basically incapable of reliable uninstallation of packages; common advice is to use separate prefixes or wipe your whole installation with a series of commands that force you to reckon with the internal structure of Homebrew. It's not always compatible with other package managers for macOS, so care has to be taken if multiple alternatives are supposed to be usable. The state of Homebrew installations is so frequently a broken one that they have a dedicated subcommand for trying to figure out why Homebrew is broken in `brew doctor`, and sometimes breakages are caused by updates to macOS itself, which are installed via a separate mechanism.

And even when it works, Homebrew is essentially still always operating on fundamentally two distinct kinds of packages (traditional source-based installations in the FHS and macOS-specific `.app` bundles), whose difference is noticed and felt by every user because different subcommands are used for handling such packages, and they end up in different places.

I'd imagine, too, that the fact you had to write your own bootstrap script could be part of what the parent poster was getting at, in that Linux has a ton of choices for configuration management tooling due to its presence on the server.

Homebrew is an awesome effort, and I use it whenever Nixpkgs is missing something I don't feel like packaging myself. The casks are really nice because almost every end-user application on macOS is distributed as a DMG archive that extracts to a .app folder, so there are not as many applications one must use a browser to hunt for as there are on Windows.

I wouldn't want to mock macOS users over this, nor to disparage all of the useful and impressive work that Homebrew contributors have done in retrofitting macOS with a package manager which can do a lot. And to the extent that a bootstrapping script based on tools like Homebrew gets its job done, it is a success in its own right. But Homebrew offers nowhere near the control, speed, or basic featureset of something like apt, Portage, Nix, or zypper. And it's not integrated into the system like the native package manager is on any Linux distro. There's a lot for Linux users to miss from their old package managers when they're using Homebrew on macOS. And the font situation on macOS is a controlling, user-hostile travesty to anyone who expects their OS to do what they tell it rather than the other way around, and disconcertingly coupled with core system components besides.

tl;dr: Homebrew is a great project, but habitual Linux users on macOS know there's no place like home when it comes to package management (or font configuration, for that matter)