Software Alternatives & Reviews

MacPorts VS GNU Guix

Compare MacPorts VS GNU Guix and see what are their differences

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 logo GNU Guix

Like Nix but GNU.
  • MacPorts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-29
  • GNU Guix Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-26

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

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

Category Popularity

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

User comments

Share your experience with using MacPorts and GNU Guix. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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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.

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: over 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

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
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What are some alternatives?

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

Homebrew - The missing package manager for macOS

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.

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

Conda - Binary package manager with support for environments.

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 .

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.