I've long been a user of macports on an old G5 ppc at work. Whelp, I just got a hand me down mid-2011 iMac 27", upgraded to OS X 10.13.6.

I've also heard tell of "homebrew," which AFAIK does the same/similar stuff as macports in that it facilitates installing Unix-y/BSD packages via cli that are otherwise unavailable to the mac universe.

AKA a package manager.

A casual drive-by of the homebrew project has given me an instant dislike, mainly due to its obfuscating usage of cutesy "brewing"-metaphor names, and brown-as-in-beer color scheme. Call it an aesthetic dislike.

I like(d) macports, because it was clean and simple and mostly, it just works (and amazing to think they are/were still grinding out ppc packages all this time, but that's no longer relevant).

Has teh any experience with either/both of these package managers, and something cogent to contribute about said experience?

Ta, teh.