I always thought people had to pay for every update and upgrade, this company being apple, but just yesterday I found out the upgrade from 10 to 11 is free (don’t know about an upgrade from 11 to 12, are upgrades to the newest and still supported macOS version free?)
What other applications do macOS users get for free?
Do macOS users get more free apps if they create an account with apple?
I’ve understood adobe and MS-Office are active at the mac app store. How does apple’s business model work? Do I buy the app, pay once and get free updates and upgrades indefinitely? or do I have to pay them a monthly fee?
Can LibreOffice be used on a macOS?
Is there an emulator to use ubuntu or windows based apps on a mac? Are they free of charge?
There are a couple of other package managers, including Nix.
I use MacPorts. Pretty decent experience so far, but it is a source-based package manager, so you’ll have to wait for it to compile everything.
MacPorts is nice for keeping disk space used down, and being compiled as fast/small as possible.
Homebrew wastes a lot of space, most packages contain all their dependencies and won’t be optimized for your hardware.
Nix is really for people moving a workflow over from Linux, it’s not what you’d normally use for Mac native tools.
Homebrew has gotten a lot better about managing dependencies, and you can do cleanup to help with that. Also its library of apps is a lot bigger than MacPorts, iirc. You can also manually compile with Homebrew if you want. Most binaries don’t really need to be compiled to your specific hardware, but you have the option.
I’ve never used Nix.