upvote
> 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.

reply
MacPorts supports everything all the way back to 10.5/powerpc.
reply
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.
reply
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.
reply
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?
reply
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?
reply
If your clients are all macs it is just nicer keeping the server on macos imo. mac os is unix after all so you don't have any software incompatibilities for tools you'd probably run on the server. Time machine support on the server is built in, instead of being a sort of hack with samba if you wanted to try and run it on a linux server. I haven't messed with it much but there might be some clever stuff you could do with applescript and triggered actions, maybe schedule your compute jobs from your calendar app for example.
reply
I held onto a 2010 Mac mini server for like 11 years before retiring it due to hardware problems (blame the hot room). Time Machine is the only thing I can think of that was still relevant at the end, and even that you can do with any NAS supposedly. The macOS Server stuff was way eol, and anything worth keeping had better Linux equivalents.
reply
deleted
reply
Which Linux are you using for that?
reply
Debian.
reply
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.

reply
From elsewhere in the thread, some hard numbers on the topic. https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/homebrew-os-arch-ci/30d/

Intel homebrew is larger than Linuxbrew, yet I think it'd be shocking if they dropped support for Linuxbrew.

Old machines still work. They're still deeply useful. I'm still using daily an Intel Macbook with homebrew on it. When I no longer use it daily in some years more, it'll still make a perfect server.

reply
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.

reply
And all 27" iMacs.
reply
My server is an old mac we've upgraded. My home server is an iMac.
reply
> 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.

reply
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.
reply
Well nix and devenv are also dropping intel mac support due to apple cutting off support : (
reply
AFAIK, github action runner for intel will be deprecated at similar period, maybe that is major reason.
reply
A saving grace is they're perfect for linux distros.
reply
Does brew gather statistics that could show what portion of users is on Intel vs Apple Silicon?
reply
https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/homebrew-os-arch-ci/30d/

From people who haven’t disabled analytics.

reply