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> (2020-11-15) There won’t be any support for native ARM Homebrew installations for months to come. See both #7857 (comment) about CI infrastructure and #7857 (

> (2020-11-15) There won’t be any support for native ARM Homebrew installations for months to come. See both #7857 (comment) about CI infrastructure and #7857 (comment) about GCC for details. Tbh it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this, and would ensure that it happened sooner. I mean, Apple work closely with Adobe and other software companies to ensure a good experience for the end users. At least I think they do. And there are quite a lot of people using and depending on Homebrew. Take myself for example, an Apple customer. I use an iPhone and a MacBook Air. But many of the tools available through Homebrew are so essential to me that without Homebrew I likely would have stuck with Linux and FreeBSD for my laptop too like I used to instead of using a MacBook Air at all. And it’s not just one laptop either. In the future when I can afford to I am going to buy more Apple computers.

dblooman 6y ago
I think at one point homebrew had to crowdfund buying Mac minis, so not surprised
- ognarb 6y ago
  Max Howell should have continued to hack on KDE instead of creating homebrew ;)
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Apple recently donated Apple silicon Macs to Homebrew for CI.
  - hu3 6y ago
    Reminder that Homebrew was released 11 years ago. How is it acceptable that Apple donates just now? Even more so when Apple themselves use Homebrew. tags:#apple edit: I don't mind the foreseen responseless downvotes. This is more of a personal note on yet another reason to stay away from APPL after having problems with iPhone 6 CPU throtling and MacBook Pro keyboard fiasco.
    - pwinnski 6y ago
      I'm not following the logic. Because Homebrew was developed 11 years ago on generally available hardware by people who already had such hardware, Apple... owed them free hardware? For what purpose? Just to say thank you? Homebrew isn't a cross-platform thing. It's written by MacOS users for MacOS users. (Although I guess it now also supports Linux.) The project didn't need anything from Apple as long as Apple was using generally-available hardware. Once Apple announced new hardware, they donated hardware to avoid the brew devs needing to buy new hardware. I'm not sure why anyone would expect anything before then.
      - hu3 6y ago
        Development, mantainance, support and servers cost money and time. The least I would expect from a tax evading megacorp like Apple was to support the development of a tool that's so widespread and important to developers on macs. That would be the smart thing to do. The fact that homebrew is specific to macs only adds insult to injury because that's even more reason to support such a tool and strengthen their ecosystem. Throwing a bone so late in the game with no extra support other than a few beta machines worth a single week of one developer's income is laughable. I shouldn't be surprided by Apple's stinginess. Last time they got hacked by a one-of-a-kind security research team which found dozens of vulnerabilities, the team was paid within 6 digits what could easily sell for 7 ou perhaps 8 digits to state actors. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24718078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24718078
        alwillis 6y ago
        The least I would expect from a tax evading megacorp like Apple… Could any global corporation pay more in taxes? Absolutely. But paying $35 billion in taxes and being the world's largest tax payer is not nothing [1]. [1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/11/the-facts-about-apple-tax-payments/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/11/the-facts-about-apple...
        hu3 6y ago
        A 2017 link by Apple itself is the trust-worthy link you spam when someone accuses Apple of tax dodging. Are you serious? Well here are some non-biased results from Google's first page for your education: - Apple Avoided $40 Billion in Taxes. Now It Wants a Gold Star https://fortune.com/2018/01/18/apple-bonuses-money-us-350-billion-taxes-trump/ https://fortune.com/2018/01/18/apple-bonuses-money-us-350-bi... - Silicon Valley giants accused of avoiding over $100 billion in taxes over the last decade. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/02/silicon-valley-giants-accused-of-avoiding-100-billion-in-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/02/silicon-valley-giants-accuse... It's amazing how far Apple supporters will go to defend Apple stealing their own money.
  - LeonM 6y ago
    You have a source on this?
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25188225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25188225
      - LeonM 6y ago
        Thanks! This is what I love about HN: the actual people behind the stories comment here.
- alwillis 6y ago
  That was a long time ago; basically ancient history now.
monkin 6y ago
> Tbh it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this, and would ensure that it happened sooner. They could donate something, but why should they? It’s community project not run by Apple. We, users, who actively use it to make professional work, should be responsible for supporting community projects like that. :)
- Smaug123 6y ago
  I kind of disagree. For the same reason that shops provide free parking, it would make sense for Apple to put effort into the de-facto package manager for macOS.
  - monkin 6y ago
    The parking analogy is missed, as they provide you macOS for free, and many other apps. What you will do with them is up to you. And, don’t forget about MacPorts, which is more “core Apple philosophy” than Homebrew.
    - Smaug123 6y ago
      I don't assert entitlement to it. It's just that my next laptop will not be a Mac because of a collection of reasons all in this ballpark.
    - saurik 6y ago
      They don't "provide macOS for free" any more than they provided the T key on your mac keyboard for free: their software is only designed to run on their hardware (for which they also attempt legal restrictions to prevent you using it elsewhere in addition to cryptographic DRM techniques) and they really only want you running their software in their hardware (which they already go to lengths to enforce on iOS and which they increasingly are pushing onto macs)... the software may as well be firmware (and in fact that is what Apple calls it on iOS) and is part of the vertically integrated product they sold you; so being annoyed about this is at least as legitimate about being annoyed that they didn't implement well any other feature of this laptop you are paying over a thousand dollars for (and, as stated by the person you are responding to, not just in their response to you but also in the post you responded to, the response is to just take their money elsewhere, which is _great_).
ghayes 6y ago
You can run homebrew Rosetta though, right? Native is, of course, the preferred direction, but this doesn’t mean you’re hosed on an M1 MacBook by any means.
- saurik 6y ago
  Yeah... as much as I tend to dislike Apple and their decisions, this is a complaint I don't really understand... especially since the M1 with Rosetta 2 supposedly runs software better than the Intel macs did anyway! I actually chalk this up to the weird fetish people who use Apple products tend to have with things being exactly "modern" as opposed to being stable and functional or even performant (which tends to lead them to pester people to upgrade to new things on the Apple treadmill constantly rather than support new features or use cases... Windows and Android users don't do this and I frankly think are much better off--both professionally and psychologically--because of it). Put elsewise: Apple did do the work of porting homebrew... by writing Rosetta 2, and they probably tested it on Homebrew internally to make sure it was compatible with lots of Homebrew packages.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Yes, I just did last night (to install youTube-dl in fact). You do have to specify Terminal to launch using Rosetta however.
- rewtraw 6y ago
  Yes. And it has worked perfectly for me so far, as if I was still using brew on an Intel mac. People complaining that they can't do development on an M1 mac because of the lack of homebrew support either don't realize you can simply run it under Rosetta, or are just complaining for the sake of it.
thejosh 6y ago
Given Apples track record regarding everything else, is this surprising? They are against right to repair, want to have their own walled garden for both mobile and desktop, so why would they help with this?
- throwaway989472 6y ago
  Because they use it internally.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  Homebrew makes Macs more attractive for more people, with little "loss of control" from Apple. I'm sure Apple (people) themselves use Homebrew internal.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Some engineers and teams do, yes.
gigatexal 6y ago
Yeah imagine if Apple did sponsor them how much more they could do.
blinkingled 6y ago
Apple doesn't really have any interest in making it easier for people to use Macs for anything that doesn't benefit their closed ecosystem - they are still ok with you using it for open source or enterprise work so long as they don't have to do anything special. That part of their stance has been very consistent. People have been consistently rewarding them for this direction by buying more of their stuff and relying on open source projects to fill in the gaps without really acknowledging the obvious problem that Apple has made it increasingly unattractive to use their hardware to do anything other than Apple stuff. To me it matters most that I be able to do things that I want easily on the platform I choose - in that sense PC hardware with Linux is the best choice I have, with Windows coming in 2nd due to how much Microsoft has done to make their OS attractive for wide variety of use cases that are not necessarily to Microsoft's direct benefit.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Apple uses Homebrew internally; it is in their best interest to keep it working on Apple silicon.
  - blinkingled 6y ago
    Didn't know that, thanks - have they contributed to homebrew in the past? If they have then then it's just sloppiness to release hardware without contributing a port and maybe later on we will see it happen?
    - my123 6y ago
      Homebrew works today (w/ build all packages instead of prebuilt bottles available), however they have a policy of not having downstream patches, so that source trees upstream have to have the Apple Silicon patches. For packages such as GCC, that of course will take a lot of time. For Java, there are other supported runtimes like Azul Zulu, but Homebrew just wants OpenJDK and not much else.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
marsokod 6y ago
A bit tongue-in-cheek, but Apple only just launched the public beta phase of MacOS on ARM. There is plenty of time for developers to work on this until the release of the stable product (M2 or whatever it will be named).
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Apple has launched a public release for macOS running on Apple silicon–it's what the new M1-based Macs are running.
  - dijit 6y ago
    Pessimistically: the first public release of anything is basically a beta test. Semantically this is not the case because they've "released", sure, but I don't think there's anything meaningful you can do until you scale out like this.
hbbio 6y ago
Oh yes! I am holding off purchasing multiple ARM Macs until homebrew works properly. We need them for our development and ops work, and now these uber-cool Macs are out, buying old Intel ones has become a no-no too, so we don't buy any desktops/laptops at all! If you read this and work at Apple, you can show this message to your bosses and I hope that it could entice the company to sponsor Homebrew with hardware + engineer time to help the project go forward. I am pretty sure than homebrew generates 100s of millions of sales for Macs (100k computers sold instead of Linux laptops if homebrew did not exist seems reasonable).
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Hundreds of millions of Macs is the right order of magnitude to measure total sales–most Mac users are not developers using Homebrew. And the relevant people are almost certainly already aware of the existence of Homebrew.
  - Technically 6y ago
    This is a dumb conversation wasting the time of everyone involved.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  It does work, though. It just runs through Rosetta like everything else that hasn't been updated yet.
- alwillis 6y ago
  If you read this and work at Apple, you can show this message to your bosses and I hope that it could entice the company to sponsor Homebrew with hardware + engineer time to help the project go forward. As you can read further down the thread, the Homebrew team was granted test units during the summer and had M1 Macs donated to them once they shipped.
sfifs 6y ago
> But many of the tools available through Homebrew are so essential to me that without Homebrew I likely would have stuck with Linux and FreeBSD for my laptop Apple is sending you a message on your value to them as a customer by the fact that they didn't bother :-) Have you tried WSL2 lately? You can get way more powerful systems with a Linux environment and soon to arrive GPU pass through.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  My experience with WSL2 is that it’s a bajillion little broken stuffs here and there. If you are not doing the same exact kind of web development that everyone else is, it’s not a smooth experience. Anyway it’s not about value if customers or anything, they’re just jackasses. Apple could afford to fix 10,000 different concerns simultaneously, and many companies do achieve that level of support, at least proportionate to the resources others have. There isn’t some strategy here.
  - arvinsim 6y ago
    Tried WSL2 for a while but there was still a lot of things that needs polishing. Finally decided on dual booting Pop!_OS and couldn't have been any happier. It's as close to MacOS as I can get in a desktop system. Due to Proton, I can now play games now too!
- rbrtl 6y ago
  Whereas the Linux community is renowned for valuing the opinions of a single, self-righteous, abhorrently arrogant “super genius” above those of concerned users, who have zero recourse and have only wasted their own time by complaining. At least they didn’t waste money on a well-supported, stable, user environment with a single managing entity who can reason well about the average environment to which it’s deployed. Enjoy your complete freedom to wile away your life and your hairline (based on my personal experience) worrying more whether that weird bug was the OSS porn downloader you installed last night or just a regular OS bug that the Swedish/Finnish wizard will ignore because he has no financial incentive to fix your weird issue. Edit to fix Torvalds’ nationality.
tambourine_man 6y ago
Really weird indeed. The fact that they don't have an official package management system these days is already odd, but not helping the most popular one is just shooting yourself in the foot.
- Toutouxc 6y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Windows didn't have one until a few months ago..? Also, the Mac App Store has been around for 10 years, Homebrew for 11 years and MacPorts for 18 years, so it's not like there was an urgent need to build one.
  - tambourine_man 6y ago
    It didn't, but Windows was very late at this too. The Mac App Store is for app delivery, similar, but not exactly a replacement. A package management system must take care of versions, dependencies, such as, this version of MySQL needs OpenSSL version X, Readline Y, etc. Make sure it doesn't mess with Python's OpenSSL/readline decencies which are both different from the ones used by the OS, and so on.
avianlyric 6y ago
I don’t understand why people are expecting day one support for applications like Homebrew. By its very nature Homebrew is going to hit every edge case that can possibly exist during this transition process. It also has a huge number of indirect dependancies, also driven by its nature as a package manager. Meaning a huge amount of work across many projects is needed to get Homebrew “working” for everyone. We’re at the start of Apples two year transition to ARM CPUs. If important thing X doesn’t work right, and it’s important to your workflow, then buy an Intel Mac. Otherwise have patience and wait for people work through the issues. Besides in a years time Apple are undoubtedly going to release the M2, M3 etc with a whole slew of “pro” devices better suited for developers. As to why Adobe gets a helping hand. Simple, Adobe’s customers almost certainly make up a bigger portion of Apple’s revenue than developers. Plus normal people understand what photoshop is, and understand how important it is to work on these new Mac. The general public hasn’t even heard of Homebrew, never mind understands how impressive it would be to get such software working on day 0.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > I don’t understand why people are expecting day one support for applications like Homebrew. I'm not paying the Homebrew developers anything so I've got no right to expect anything or criticise whatever they choose to do with their time and their project. But if they did want compatibility it's not true that they're 'at the start of Apples two year transition to ARM CPUs' - you have been able to access development machines for many months. I got one and I don't maintain anything nearly as important as Homebrew. The reason Apple do developer previews, betas, and early access to hardware is so that you can have day-one support, if you want it.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    Homebrew does not control the software that it helps distribute. There are hundreds of pieces that need to work together for this to work, so Homebrew developers can at most prepare their infrastructure, which I don't think is a big issue here. Moreover, the number of developers with access to an M1 chip until last month was very small. For most of these people, the M1 transition process is just starting.
s_dev 6y ago
>And there are quite a lot of people using and depending on Homebrew. People are under no obligation to upgrade immediately to big sur. I'm holding out on Catalina for a few months with older hardware. M1 is a big change and I'm not surprised it will initially break a few things. Also the point of having third party app ecosystem is that the first party doesn't have to maintain them and yet still receive some benefit from them.
rsynnott 6y ago
> I mean, Apple work closely with Adobe and other software companies to ensure a good experience for the end users. At least I think they do. If they are, they're not doing a very good job; Adobe stuff is reportedly kind of buggy even under Rosetta, and historically Adobe has been very, very slow with the x86_64 transition, the Intel transition, the MacOS 10 transition, and so on.
e40 6y ago
Apple's support of my software company was terrible and shameful. I got a dev unit (mac mini). It had beta 2 on it. We started the porting effort and had questions. Forums were the only place they said answers could be had. Never got any answers. When beta 10 was released, it just wouldn't install. We tried for a week then saw a post on the forums that gave a hint about Mac-to-Mac reset of the firmware and general machine state. We had to upgrade another machine to Catalina to use it (inconvenient, but not a killer). When 11.0.1 came out it wouldn't install and now the machine is a brick. We ordered a production mini with the M1 and it will be here in late December. While we sit with the brick and can't do any porting. At every step we hit brick walls and had zero help from Apple. It was beyond frustrating.
- treesknees 6y ago
  For what it's worth, you could have walked into an Apple store and bought the M1 Mini the same day. No need to wait 3 weeks.
  - toast0 6y ago
    If you're near an Apple store, and if you're comfortable with the local covid risks.
    - cpursley 6y ago
      Oh good grief. I assume you purchase groceries in person, at least occasionally?
    - gjs278 6y ago
      if you die picking up a mac at the apple store, it was time for you to go anyways
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    Only 8GB ram config, need an Apple Sore nearby
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
m463 6y ago
> it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this Apple has lost its way. They should not only be helping with this, but SHIPPING more stuff like this themselves. And "pro" has lost its meaning. It is now for "youtubers who want nice stuff" and don't mind someone else controlling their experience, as opposed to engineers and scientists and creative people who are actually creating the future.
vmchale 6y ago
> Tbh it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this, and would ensure that it happened sooner. It's unfortunate they don't have a package manager. They could do better than apt if they put resources behind it.
robertoandred 6y ago
They did and have supported Homebrew and others with Apple Silicon. They said so back at the original announcement https://twitter.com/MarkVillacampa/status/1275200446764912643 https://twitter.com/MarkVillacampa/status/127520044676491264...
mlindner 6y ago
It's homebrew's own choice that they have 100% of everything on Apple before they ship. They're simply lazy and don't want to have to deal with support of people complaining why something doesn't work. This is the problem with Homebrew and why people shouldn't use it.
Mandatum 6y ago
Even the Developer Transition Kit / Universal App Quickstart Program has been handled poorly. Bunch of teething and hardware failure/DOA issues and arbitrary limitations with near zero engagement from Apple. Nothing like the original Intel transition program, I'm willing to bet they're going to give credit instead of hardware for the exchange this time around too. It's an entirely different company now. Apple doesn't NEED to subsidize or keep developers happy anymore. They've already won us and the marketshare. SE, vertical integration, leapfrog CPU and battery life.. They don't have any competitor, so why waste money investing in the ecosystem? We're going to build for them anyway.
- rbrtl 6y ago
  Sure. They just developed a new chip, with a new 5nm process, at to drop all the devs off a cliff and hang them out to dry. That will sell units. If they don't work the issues out they'll have to partially shelve the design and go grovelling back to Intel for CPUs because things will continue not to work until it affects the profits. I would be incredibly surprised to see "near zero engagement" with major vendors on this, have (e.g. Adobe) devs written about big issues, or just FOSS wranglers who feel their Free project is undervalued? I agree there's been a big shift in focus. I'm seriously unhappy about the Amazon/Google level of ad-down-throat-ramming I have to put up with on my Apple TV. But I don't think they're throwing the towel in on hardware and software innovation.
arvinsim 6y ago
I think people still has this belief that power users is still an important target market for Apple. Basing on their hardware decisions and software support, I don't think this is true anymore.

dblooman 6y ago

I think at one point homebrew had to crowdfund buying Mac minis, so not surprised

ognarb 6y ago
Max Howell should have continued to hack on KDE instead of creating homebrew ;)
saagarjha 6y ago
Apple recently donated Apple silicon Macs to Homebrew for CI.
- hu3 6y ago
  Reminder that Homebrew was released 11 years ago. How is it acceptable that Apple donates just now? Even more so when Apple themselves use Homebrew. tags:#apple edit: I don't mind the foreseen responseless downvotes. This is more of a personal note on yet another reason to stay away from APPL after having problems with iPhone 6 CPU throtling and MacBook Pro keyboard fiasco.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    I'm not following the logic. Because Homebrew was developed 11 years ago on generally available hardware by people who already had such hardware, Apple... owed them free hardware? For what purpose? Just to say thank you? Homebrew isn't a cross-platform thing. It's written by MacOS users for MacOS users. (Although I guess it now also supports Linux.) The project didn't need anything from Apple as long as Apple was using generally-available hardware. Once Apple announced new hardware, they donated hardware to avoid the brew devs needing to buy new hardware. I'm not sure why anyone would expect anything before then.
    - hu3 6y ago
      Development, mantainance, support and servers cost money and time. The least I would expect from a tax evading megacorp like Apple was to support the development of a tool that's so widespread and important to developers on macs. That would be the smart thing to do. The fact that homebrew is specific to macs only adds insult to injury because that's even more reason to support such a tool and strengthen their ecosystem. Throwing a bone so late in the game with no extra support other than a few beta machines worth a single week of one developer's income is laughable. I shouldn't be surprided by Apple's stinginess. Last time they got hacked by a one-of-a-kind security research team which found dozens of vulnerabilities, the team was paid within 6 digits what could easily sell for 7 ou perhaps 8 digits to state actors. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24718078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24718078
      - alwillis 6y ago
        The least I would expect from a tax evading megacorp like Apple… Could any global corporation pay more in taxes? Absolutely. But paying $35 billion in taxes and being the world's largest tax payer is not nothing [1]. [1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/11/the-facts-about-apple-tax-payments/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/11/the-facts-about-apple...
        hu3 6y ago
        A 2017 link by Apple itself is the trust-worthy link you spam when someone accuses Apple of tax dodging. Are you serious? Well here are some non-biased results from Google's first page for your education: - Apple Avoided $40 Billion in Taxes. Now It Wants a Gold Star https://fortune.com/2018/01/18/apple-bonuses-money-us-350-billion-taxes-trump/ https://fortune.com/2018/01/18/apple-bonuses-money-us-350-bi... - Silicon Valley giants accused of avoiding over $100 billion in taxes over the last decade. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/02/silicon-valley-giants-accused-of-avoiding-100-billion-in-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/02/silicon-valley-giants-accuse... It's amazing how far Apple supporters will go to defend Apple stealing their own money.
- LeonM 6y ago
  You have a source on this?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25188225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25188225
    - LeonM 6y ago
      Thanks! This is what I love about HN: the actual people behind the stories comment here.
alwillis 6y ago
That was a long time ago; basically ancient history now.

monkin 6y ago

> Tbh it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this, and would ensure that it happened sooner. They could donate something, but why should they? It’s community project not run by Apple. We, users, who actively use it to make professional work, should be responsible for supporting community projects like that. :)

Smaug123 6y ago
I kind of disagree. For the same reason that shops provide free parking, it would make sense for Apple to put effort into the de-facto package manager for macOS.
- monkin 6y ago
  The parking analogy is missed, as they provide you macOS for free, and many other apps. What you will do with them is up to you. And, don’t forget about MacPorts, which is more “core Apple philosophy” than Homebrew.
  - Smaug123 6y ago
    I don't assert entitlement to it. It's just that my next laptop will not be a Mac because of a collection of reasons all in this ballpark.
  - saurik 6y ago
    They don't "provide macOS for free" any more than they provided the T key on your mac keyboard for free: their software is only designed to run on their hardware (for which they also attempt legal restrictions to prevent you using it elsewhere in addition to cryptographic DRM techniques) and they really only want you running their software in their hardware (which they already go to lengths to enforce on iOS and which they increasingly are pushing onto macs)... the software may as well be firmware (and in fact that is what Apple calls it on iOS) and is part of the vertically integrated product they sold you; so being annoyed about this is at least as legitimate about being annoyed that they didn't implement well any other feature of this laptop you are paying over a thousand dollars for (and, as stated by the person you are responding to, not just in their response to you but also in the post you responded to, the response is to just take their money elsewhere, which is _great_).

ghayes 6y ago

You can run homebrew Rosetta though, right? Native is, of course, the preferred direction, but this doesn’t mean you’re hosed on an M1 MacBook by any means.

saurik 6y ago
Yeah... as much as I tend to dislike Apple and their decisions, this is a complaint I don't really understand... especially since the M1 with Rosetta 2 supposedly runs software better than the Intel macs did anyway! I actually chalk this up to the weird fetish people who use Apple products tend to have with things being exactly "modern" as opposed to being stable and functional or even performant (which tends to lead them to pester people to upgrade to new things on the Apple treadmill constantly rather than support new features or use cases... Windows and Android users don't do this and I frankly think are much better off--both professionally and psychologically--because of it). Put elsewise: Apple did do the work of porting homebrew... by writing Rosetta 2, and they probably tested it on Homebrew internally to make sure it was compatible with lots of Homebrew packages.
JKCalhoun 6y ago
Yes, I just did last night (to install youTube-dl in fact). You do have to specify Terminal to launch using Rosetta however.
rewtraw 6y ago
Yes. And it has worked perfectly for me so far, as if I was still using brew on an Intel mac. People complaining that they can't do development on an M1 mac because of the lack of homebrew support either don't realize you can simply run it under Rosetta, or are just complaining for the sake of it.

thejosh 6y ago

Given Apples track record regarding everything else, is this surprising? They are against right to repair, want to have their own walled garden for both mobile and desktop, so why would they help with this?

throwaway989472 6y ago
Because they use it internally.
madeofpalk 6y ago
Homebrew makes Macs more attractive for more people, with little "loss of control" from Apple. I'm sure Apple (people) themselves use Homebrew internal.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Some engineers and teams do, yes.

gigatexal 6y ago

Yeah imagine if Apple did sponsor them how much more they could do.

blinkingled 6y ago

Apple doesn't really have any interest in making it easier for people to use Macs for anything that doesn't benefit their closed ecosystem - they are still ok with you using it for open source or enterprise work so long as they don't have to do anything special. That part of their stance has been very consistent. People have been consistently rewarding them for this direction by buying more of their stuff and relying on open source projects to fill in the gaps without really acknowledging the obvious problem that Apple has made it increasingly unattractive to use their hardware to do anything other than Apple stuff. To me it matters most that I be able to do things that I want easily on the platform I choose - in that sense PC hardware with Linux is the best choice I have, with Windows coming in 2nd due to how much Microsoft has done to make their OS attractive for wide variety of use cases that are not necessarily to Microsoft's direct benefit.

saagarjha 6y ago
Apple uses Homebrew internally; it is in their best interest to keep it working on Apple silicon.
- blinkingled 6y ago
  Didn't know that, thanks - have they contributed to homebrew in the past? If they have then then it's just sloppiness to release hardware without contributing a port and maybe later on we will see it happen?
  - my123 6y ago
    Homebrew works today (w/ build all packages instead of prebuilt bottles available), however they have a policy of not having downstream patches, so that source trees upstream have to have the Apple Silicon patches. For packages such as GCC, that of course will take a lot of time. For Java, there are other supported runtimes like Azul Zulu, but Homebrew just wants OpenJDK and not much else.
    - saagarjha 6y ago

marsokod 6y ago

A bit tongue-in-cheek, but Apple only just launched the public beta phase of MacOS on ARM. There is plenty of time for developers to work on this until the release of the stable product (M2 or whatever it will be named).

saagarjha 6y ago
Apple has launched a public release for macOS running on Apple silicon–it's what the new M1-based Macs are running.
- dijit 6y ago
  Pessimistically: the first public release of anything is basically a beta test. Semantically this is not the case because they've "released", sure, but I don't think there's anything meaningful you can do until you scale out like this.

hbbio 6y ago

Oh yes! I am holding off purchasing multiple ARM Macs until homebrew works properly. We need them for our development and ops work, and now these uber-cool Macs are out, buying old Intel ones has become a no-no too, so we don't buy any desktops/laptops at all! If you read this and work at Apple, you can show this message to your bosses and I hope that it could entice the company to sponsor Homebrew with hardware + engineer time to help the project go forward. I am pretty sure than homebrew generates 100s of millions of sales for Macs (100k computers sold instead of Linux laptops if homebrew did not exist seems reasonable).

saagarjha 6y ago
Hundreds of millions of Macs is the right order of magnitude to measure total sales–most Mac users are not developers using Homebrew. And the relevant people are almost certainly already aware of the existence of Homebrew.
- Technically 6y ago
  This is a dumb conversation wasting the time of everyone involved.
user-the-name 6y ago
It does work, though. It just runs through Rosetta like everything else that hasn't been updated yet.
alwillis 6y ago
If you read this and work at Apple, you can show this message to your bosses and I hope that it could entice the company to sponsor Homebrew with hardware + engineer time to help the project go forward. As you can read further down the thread, the Homebrew team was granted test units during the summer and had M1 Macs donated to them once they shipped.

sfifs 6y ago

> But many of the tools available through Homebrew are so essential to me that without Homebrew I likely would have stuck with Linux and FreeBSD for my laptop Apple is sending you a message on your value to them as a customer by the fact that they didn't bother :-) Have you tried WSL2 lately? You can get way more powerful systems with a Linux environment and soon to arrive GPU pass through.

an_opabinia 6y ago
My experience with WSL2 is that it’s a bajillion little broken stuffs here and there. If you are not doing the same exact kind of web development that everyone else is, it’s not a smooth experience. Anyway it’s not about value if customers or anything, they’re just jackasses. Apple could afford to fix 10,000 different concerns simultaneously, and many companies do achieve that level of support, at least proportionate to the resources others have. There isn’t some strategy here.
- arvinsim 6y ago
  Tried WSL2 for a while but there was still a lot of things that needs polishing. Finally decided on dual booting Pop!_OS and couldn't have been any happier. It's as close to MacOS as I can get in a desktop system. Due to Proton, I can now play games now too!
rbrtl 6y ago
Whereas the Linux community is renowned for valuing the opinions of a single, self-righteous, abhorrently arrogant “super genius” above those of concerned users, who have zero recourse and have only wasted their own time by complaining. At least they didn’t waste money on a well-supported, stable, user environment with a single managing entity who can reason well about the average environment to which it’s deployed. Enjoy your complete freedom to wile away your life and your hairline (based on my personal experience) worrying more whether that weird bug was the OSS porn downloader you installed last night or just a regular OS bug that the Swedish/Finnish wizard will ignore because he has no financial incentive to fix your weird issue. Edit to fix Torvalds’ nationality.

tambourine_man 6y ago

Really weird indeed. The fact that they don't have an official package management system these days is already odd, but not helping the most popular one is just shooting yourself in the foot.

Toutouxc 6y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Windows didn't have one until a few months ago..? Also, the Mac App Store has been around for 10 years, Homebrew for 11 years and MacPorts for 18 years, so it's not like there was an urgent need to build one.
- tambourine_man 6y ago
  It didn't, but Windows was very late at this too. The Mac App Store is for app delivery, similar, but not exactly a replacement. A package management system must take care of versions, dependencies, such as, this version of MySQL needs OpenSSL version X, Readline Y, etc. Make sure it doesn't mess with Python's OpenSSL/readline decencies which are both different from the ones used by the OS, and so on.

avianlyric 6y ago

I don’t understand why people are expecting day one support for applications like Homebrew. By its very nature Homebrew is going to hit every edge case that can possibly exist during this transition process. It also has a huge number of indirect dependancies, also driven by its nature as a package manager. Meaning a huge amount of work across many projects is needed to get Homebrew “working” for everyone. We’re at the start of Apples two year transition to ARM CPUs. If important thing X doesn’t work right, and it’s important to your workflow, then buy an Intel Mac. Otherwise have patience and wait for people work through the issues. Besides in a years time Apple are undoubtedly going to release the M2, M3 etc with a whole slew of “pro” devices better suited for developers. As to why Adobe gets a helping hand. Simple, Adobe’s customers almost certainly make up a bigger portion of Apple’s revenue than developers. Plus normal people understand what photoshop is, and understand how important it is to work on these new Mac. The general public hasn’t even heard of Homebrew, never mind understands how impressive it would be to get such software working on day 0.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> I don’t understand why people are expecting day one support for applications like Homebrew. I'm not paying the Homebrew developers anything so I've got no right to expect anything or criticise whatever they choose to do with their time and their project. But if they did want compatibility it's not true that they're 'at the start of Apples two year transition to ARM CPUs' - you have been able to access development machines for many months. I got one and I don't maintain anything nearly as important as Homebrew. The reason Apple do developer previews, betas, and early access to hardware is so that you can have day-one support, if you want it.
- coliveira 6y ago
  Homebrew does not control the software that it helps distribute. There are hundreds of pieces that need to work together for this to work, so Homebrew developers can at most prepare their infrastructure, which I don't think is a big issue here. Moreover, the number of developers with access to an M1 chip until last month was very small. For most of these people, the M1 transition process is just starting.

s_dev 6y ago

>And there are quite a lot of people using and depending on Homebrew. People are under no obligation to upgrade immediately to big sur. I'm holding out on Catalina for a few months with older hardware. M1 is a big change and I'm not surprised it will initially break a few things. Also the point of having third party app ecosystem is that the first party doesn't have to maintain them and yet still receive some benefit from them.

rsynnott 6y ago

> I mean, Apple work closely with Adobe and other software companies to ensure a good experience for the end users. At least I think they do. If they are, they're not doing a very good job; Adobe stuff is reportedly kind of buggy even under Rosetta, and historically Adobe has been very, very slow with the x86_64 transition, the Intel transition, the MacOS 10 transition, and so on.

e40 6y ago

Apple's support of my software company was terrible and shameful. I got a dev unit (mac mini). It had beta 2 on it. We started the porting effort and had questions. Forums were the only place they said answers could be had. Never got any answers. When beta 10 was released, it just wouldn't install. We tried for a week then saw a post on the forums that gave a hint about Mac-to-Mac reset of the firmware and general machine state. We had to upgrade another machine to Catalina to use it (inconvenient, but not a killer). When 11.0.1 came out it wouldn't install and now the machine is a brick. We ordered a production mini with the M1 and it will be here in late December. While we sit with the brick and can't do any porting. At every step we hit brick walls and had zero help from Apple. It was beyond frustrating.

treesknees 6y ago
For what it's worth, you could have walked into an Apple store and bought the M1 Mini the same day. No need to wait 3 weeks.
- toast0 6y ago
  If you're near an Apple store, and if you're comfortable with the local covid risks.
  - cpursley 6y ago
    Oh good grief. I assume you purchase groceries in person, at least occasionally?
  - gjs278 6y ago
    if you die picking up a mac at the apple store, it was time for you to go anyways
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  Only 8GB ram config, need an Apple Sore nearby
- smnrchrds 6y ago

m463 6y ago

> it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this Apple has lost its way. They should not only be helping with this, but SHIPPING more stuff like this themselves. And "pro" has lost its meaning. It is now for "youtubers who want nice stuff" and don't mind someone else controlling their experience, as opposed to engineers and scientists and creative people who are actually creating the future.

vmchale 6y ago

> Tbh it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this, and would ensure that it happened sooner. It's unfortunate they don't have a package manager. They could do better than apt if they put resources behind it.

robertoandred 6y ago

They did and have supported Homebrew and others with Apple Silicon. They said so back at the original announcement https://twitter.com/MarkVillacampa/status/1275200446764912643 https://twitter.com/MarkVillacampa/status/127520044676491264...

mlindner 6y ago

It's homebrew's own choice that they have 100% of everything on Apple before they ship. They're simply lazy and don't want to have to deal with support of people complaining why something doesn't work. This is the problem with Homebrew and why people shouldn't use it.

Mandatum 6y ago

Even the Developer Transition Kit / Universal App Quickstart Program has been handled poorly. Bunch of teething and hardware failure/DOA issues and arbitrary limitations with near zero engagement from Apple. Nothing like the original Intel transition program, I'm willing to bet they're going to give credit instead of hardware for the exchange this time around too. It's an entirely different company now. Apple doesn't NEED to subsidize or keep developers happy anymore. They've already won us and the marketshare. SE, vertical integration, leapfrog CPU and battery life.. They don't have any competitor, so why waste money investing in the ecosystem? We're going to build for them anyway.

rbrtl 6y ago
Sure. They just developed a new chip, with a new 5nm process, at to drop all the devs off a cliff and hang them out to dry. That will sell units. If they don't work the issues out they'll have to partially shelve the design and go grovelling back to Intel for CPUs because things will continue not to work until it affects the profits. I would be incredibly surprised to see "near zero engagement" with major vendors on this, have (e.g. Adobe) devs written about big issues, or just FOSS wranglers who feel their Free project is undervalued? I agree there's been a big shift in focus. I'm seriously unhappy about the Amazon/Google level of ad-down-throat-ramming I have to put up with on my Apple TV. But I don't think they're throwing the towel in on hardware and software innovation.

arvinsim 6y ago

I think people still has this belief that power users is still an important target market for Apple. Basing on their hardware decisions and software support, I don't think this is true anymore.