Literally just upgraded before seeing this post; I had 31 outdated packages and the first thing I saw was how blazing fast it was! I looked online to see if something changed and saw this post.

Speed was my biggest complaint about brew, so I'm glad to cross that one off my list of things I don't like about brew.

Thank you for your hard work BTW, brew's been a lifesaver on macOS and immutable distros.

I don't know what I would do without brew on my Macs. Thank you and everyone who contributes!

The dedicated user isn't really required; it just expects that /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew exists. That can just be a symlink to your home directory. But yes, creating that symlink requires root on most systems. Brew itself doesn't require root or that pathname; you can put packages anywhere, but then many will have to be built from scratch since the pre-built packages don't work. And you need bubblewrap installed (which requires root) to use the sandbox, but again that is optional.

All that said, when you are running without a sandbox installing to a nonstandard location, not everything works consistently. I run this mode all the time. But it has been getting better.

The dedicated user account is optional.

It uses root once to chown its prefix directory /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew