Comment by philistine

3 days ago

The deprecation of Intel support is agressive! Every Mac enthusiast I know who uses a Mac as a server uses their old machines, which are pretty much all Intel. We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple!

I know supporting Intel is an ordeal and a choice, but I'm firmly on the camp that Homebrew should find a way to maintain Intel support as long as possible.

24 comments

philistine

Reply
saghm  3 days ago

> We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple!

If only Apple put a fraction of its resources towards maintaining something like homebrew (or paying the people who do), maybe the situation would be different.

  • frumplestlatz  3 days ago

    MacPorts supports everything all the way back to 10.5/powerpc.

    • saghm  2 days ago

      That's impressive, but I'd be reluctant to criticize one open source maintained effort for not having parity with another when it's all volunteer-driven. My point was that Apple is an insanely profitable company with resources that are effectively unlimited compared to what Homebrew has (and presumably likewise when compared to Macports), so the initial framing of "this will stop being supported before Apple" seemed pretty silly to me.

stouset  3 days ago

If anything, the overwhelming majority of Apple enthusiasts have gone all-in on Apple Silicon. I sincerely doubt those using old Macs as servers are anything but a rounding error.

  • asdff  3 days ago

    Maybe among the general mac population they are a rounding error. But among the mac population who actually peeks behind the curtain and uses homebrew?

    • jrmg  3 days ago

      Maybe I’m just biased because it’s what I’ve done personally, but almost everyone using an old Intel Mac as a server is surely running Linux?

      5 replies →

    • stouset  3 days ago

      Yes, to such a stunning degree that I’m having a hard time believing you’re serious. The M1 was utterly transformative. The install base of homebrew is enormous. The proportion who are keeping old Mac hardware around as home servers is minuscule. The proportion of those who are keeping old Intel Macs are a fraction of that, and the ones who aren’t just running Linux on them are yet another fraction.

      That’s not to say you’re crazy or anything. You do you. But do understand that you almost certainly constitute a nearly irrelevant minority of users of homebrew.

      1 reply →

mikemcquaid  3 days ago

> We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple!

Homebrew will still work (increasingly poorly) on macOS Intel for a year after that, it just won’t be “supported” or tested in CI environments (where currently macOS Intel usually slows down the release of lots of software for all other platforms).

That a volunteer run project with no employees is unable to come anywhere near the support levels of the world’s second biggest, trillion dollar company should not be surprise.

We’re also limited that GitHub (part of Microsoft, 4th biggest, also trillion dollar company) will have killed all macOS Intel CI by autumn/fall 2027 too.

We are announcing this well in advance to give people migration paths to MacPorts or other hardware.

There’s nothing stopping you for doing the work to setup “Intelbrew” and support it for the community. When I started work on Homebrew it had no funding or CI or binary packages/bottles at all. I did much of that work myself. It was hard but you could do the same.

Completely reasonable to say “I don’t have time!” but: then you need to accept the decisions of those that do, sorry.

mrpippy  3 days ago

At this point that would be a 2018 Mac mini, which can only run Sequoia (which will be out-of-support at the same time as Homebrew drops Intel support).

If you want Intel support, MacPorts still runs back to Leopard.

sunaookami  3 days ago

Yeah they also removed support for --no-quarantine flag :/ I only use it for a few casks nowadays and try to avoid Homebrew as much as possible. For CLI stuff I use Nix, Home-Manager and Nix-Darwin.

  • JamesSwift  3 days ago

    Well nix and devenv are also dropping intel mac support due to apple cutting off support : (

daeho-ro  3 days ago

AFAIK, github action runner for intel will be deprecated at similar period, maybe that is major reason.