I have used brew on Linux for dev tooling, because it’s so easy to switch versions.

I realized Brew was released for Linux a while back, and my jaw dropped because… why? Brew is simply awful compared to most Linux package managers. It has gotten better over the years but I still couldn’t ever imagine preferring it over the installed out of the box package manager in quite literally any Linux distro.

Homebrew is my preferred package manager on Linux. It just seems to work more simply than apt or Flatpak for me, and it’s less context switching when I need to use macOS.

For standard apps, I agree. But being able to change the default version of Python, NodeJS, etc. just by running brew install is a lot easier than using apt/apt-get. They just aren't made to support that kind of scenario.

Sometimes you can’t use a distro’s package manager (e.g. shared hosting) but Homebrew will still work.