The Short Version
I stayed on RVM longer than I should have. Install friction, missing first-class macOS binaries, and a growing pile of GitHub issues were annoying, but tolerable, until Homebrew stopped shipping openssl@1 and RVM still treated it as a hard requirement. At that point Ruby stopped installing cleanly, the workarounds multiplied, and I moved to mise. Installs are fast, binaries show up when you need them, and one tool covers Ruby plus a lot of other runtimes.
What Was Already Painful
Before the OpenSSL mess, RVM already asked for patience.
Fresh Ruby installs pulled source builds more often than I wanted on a laptop I use for client work. macOS did not get the same smooth binary story I saw friends describe on other version managers. Every new machine meant carving out time for the same ritual: read the docs, chase a dependency, hope the flags match whatever Apple changed last quarter.
None of that was a dealbreaker on its own. Developers learn to budget time for environment setup. The problem is compounding cost. Each papercut is small until they stack into a morning you did not plan to donate to your package manager.
The Last Straw: OpenSSL@1 and Homebrew
Homebrew dropped openssl@1 from the default story users expect (old formula, security posture, maintenance burden; the details vary by tap and timeline, but the effect is the same). RVM’s install path still leaned on that stack in ways that blocked a clean Ruby install on a fresh Mac.
So you end up in the worst loop: you need Ruby to work, RVM refuses to finish without OpenSSL it cannot satisfy through normal Homebrew flows, and the “fix” is a forum thread that forks into three incompatible recipes.
That is not a sustainable foundation for a tool you touch every day.
What GitHub Already Showed
I opened the RVM repo like anyone else would, looking for an official path forward. What you see is a backlog that matches the feeling on the ground.
At the time I looked, open issues on rvm/rvm numbered in the mid hundreds (roughly five hundred forty and climbing). Some threads are years old. People share local patches, pinned formulae, and one-off shell snippets that work until the next macOS upgrade.
That pattern does not mean the maintainers failed; open source can drown in surface area. It does mean that, as a user, you are signing up to be your own support tier.
Why mise Won Me Over
mise (you may know it from its lineage as rtx) treats version management like a product problem: predictable installs, good use of prebuilt artifacts where available, and a single interface for Ruby, Node, Python, and plenty else.
On my machines the difference shows up immediately.
- Speed: I spend minutes, not lunch breaks, getting a Ruby version in place.
- Reliability: Fewer “why does this machine differ from that machine” surprises when OpenSSL and friends move on Homebrew.
- Scope: One config layer for the runtimes I already run in real projects, not a separate island per language.
That said, I am not here to pretend every team should migrate tomorrow. If RVM is frozen in CI on an image you control, migration cost is real. For a developer-owned laptop on current macOS, the ease gap has widened.
A Practical Takeaway
If you are stuck on RVM today, you are not wrong for having started there; it was the default story for a long time. If installs are breaking on current Homebrew, you are also not imagining it; the ecosystem moved, and the issue list reflects the strain.
I switched to mise, deleted a category of yak shaving from my calendar, and stopped treating “install Ruby” as a hobby project. If your goal is to write Ruby and ship work, pick a version manager that gets out of the way. For me, on macOS in 2026, that tool is mise.