Software Alternatives & Reviews

GNU Guix VS MacPorts

Compare GNU Guix VS MacPorts and see what are their differences

GNU Guix logo GNU Guix

Like Nix but GNU.

MacPorts logo MacPorts

The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.
  • GNU Guix Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-26
  • MacPorts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-29

GNU Guix videos

My crush on GNU Guix

More videos:

  • Review - Building a whole distro on top of a minimalistic language The story of GNU Guix
  • Tutorial - How to Install GNU Guix System 1.1.0 + Review

MacPorts videos

Linux Tools for your Mac. Package Management. HomeBrew, MacPorts, Fink

More videos:

  • Review - Install and Testing MacPorts on an M1 Mac
  • Review - Installing MacPorts on macOS Catalina

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to GNU Guix and MacPorts)
Developer Tools
87 87%
13% 13
Front End Package Manager
Package Manager
68 68%
32% 32
Windows Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, GNU Guix seems to be a lot more popular than MacPorts. While we know about 90 links to GNU Guix, we've tracked only 5 mentions of MacPorts. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

GNU Guix mentions (90)

  • Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration
    > So what we are missing now is a 500GB framework that can write the config file for the programming language that is writing a config file for the actual program I wish to use. That exists since 1960. It's called LISP. The e.g. https://guix.gnu.org/ uses with great success, the Guile Scheme dialect of LISP, to be precise. And FYI the "framework" is:
      $ ls --human-readable --size $(readlink $(which...
    - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • NixOS: Declarative Builds and Deployments
    > inventing a brand new purely functional language programming language. ISTM that if you dislike that, then there's GUIX. https://guix.gnu.org/ Very briefly, AFAICT, it's "Nix but using Scheme". - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Linux saved my life
    And just wait till you discover Arch Linux, Gentoo, Guix, or NixOS. Source: 10 months ago
  • The nicest web browser of 2023 uses Lisp.
    Https://guix.gnu.org for example. It did load before an update but it doesn't anymore. Source: 11 months ago
  • Java community welcomes kotlin, c/c++ community welcome rust and go and Javascript community welcomes typscript except emacs community who still refuse to welcome gnu guile.
    Is it? Seems to me it's used for some pretty cool stuff, heard of Guix? Source: 11 months ago
View more

MacPorts mentions (5)

  • Need help with running OpenBSD on VirtualBox
    Brew & macports have libvirt & virt-manager that are used to manage qemu via GUI. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Brew Is a Bad Neighbor
    Or instead of all this, try MacPorts[0], which in my experience has 99% of what you need. The biggest drawbacks are less support from quite niche packages (the ones that sets up its own homebrew tap), and a bit slower updates. But then I found it bearable much more than homebrew’s downsides. [0]: https://macports.org. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • How to prevent WireGuard from starting up (menubar) on MacOS?
    You can install wireguard-go and wireguard-tools (or boringtun, which is Cloudflare's userspace implementation) using either MacPorts or Brew. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Newbie Problem with MacOS Terminal Stuff
    That being said, I'm going to assume that you're working on MacO. Flatpaks aren't going to be an option, that's only going to work if you're using Linux (like Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, Mint, and so on). If you need to install HandBrake, you may want to consider using macports.org, or brew.sh, these are projects that provide additional libraries and packages for MacOS, this way you can install additional... Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Top 10 trending github repos of the week🚽.
    On macOS you can also install the latest release with MacPorts:. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing GNU Guix and MacPorts, you can also consider the following products

NixOS - 25 Jun 2014 . All software components in NixOS are installed using the Nix package manager. Packages in Nix are defined using the nix language to create nix expressions.

Homebrew - The missing package manager for macOS

Conda - Binary package manager with support for environments.

pkgsrc - pkgsrc is a framework for building over 17,000 open source software packages.

Portage - Portage is source-based package manager used by Gentoo and its descendants. It controls all process from fetching source through building it, installing into clean environment to "merging" with already installed software.

Homebrew Cask - Install with ease. Your software is just one command away from being ready and raring to go. Forget all about babysitting the install process step by step, from website to cleanup. ls /usr/local/Caskroom google-chrome .