For a lot of popular packages homebrew is more bleeding edge these days than whatever the default sources are for Ubuntu. It's nice not needing to add a bunch of extra apt sources to get updated packages. Another perk of homebrew is, in most cases it can't really screw up your system. After all these years apt can and still frequently does break things. Just the other day I had to help someone restore an apache config that got hosed due to apt upgrade trying to remove a package. It's in an endless loop of insisting the old package has to be installed before it can be removed or some such non-sense. Of course as you might guess this person's apt sources were full of random things that he most likely found and copy & pasted from random Internet sites. Somehow he had what I guess was a docker nightly build which, when updated, caused all the containers on his machine to be stopped. He thought docker was just buggy and crashed a lot. Good stuff. I very rarely have any of those problems with homebrew.