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Comment by mikemcquaid | Hacker News Reader

Sorry we couldn’t support this for longer :(

From the release notes:

> The Intel support decision reflects the limits of a volunteer-run project: Apple have dropped Intel x86_64 support from macOS 27 Golden Gate and GitHub Actions will retire Intel macOS runners in autumn 2027. If Apple and Microsoft’s GitHub, two of the world’s largest technology companies, cannot continue supporting macOS Intel x86_64, sadly neither can Homebrew. MacPorts still supports macOS Intel x86_64 and is likely to provide better results on this platform.

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My personal opinion, but I'd rather see wider macOS support than Linux support, if it's a sheer matter of where time is allocated.

Linux already has world class package managers.

Linux Homebrew users would disagree.

Supporting macOS Intel has been significantly harder, slower and more expensive for us the last few years than adding ARM Linux support. If it was easy and free we’d have kept it for longer (until Apple and GitHub killed theirs at least which is coming in less than a year).

Homebrew is incredibly useful for immutable Linux distributions.

That said, after trying Bazzite I now prefer CachyOS and Arch as a whole.

I can see the appeal of using Homebrew and Flatpak to keep OS updates a little more separate from app updates, although I don't really see a specific need for it for myself.

How come that MacPorts supports macOS versions all the way back to 10.5 Leopard in the latest version?

That's an excellent question for the maintainers of the MacPorts project! It can supplement the very clear and polite answer you've already received from a maintainer of Homebrew.

The polite Homebrew project that used to market themselves with "MacPorts driving you to drink?" on their website.

Different philosophy of dependency management.

Breadth of support and retention of historical support are also priorities that differ between other software distributions, especially free operating systems.

See Debian vs. Ubuntu, or NetBSD vs. DragonflyBSD.

Some software distributions emphasize package freshness and coverage, like Homebrew does, which multiplies the support burden involved for each architecture or platform supported.

Others have a more prominent focus on backwards compatibility or exotic architectures, but have a smaller or slower-moving package set.

They've never actively disallowed it, and volunteers have been happy to maintain it.

So much of GNU et al is already in Homebrew that I wonder how close you are to being able to support Intel Macs using the Linux/amd64 branch (or backend or whatever you call it) of Homebrew or something close to it, possibly after installing a few base libraries and utilities from MacPorts.

ETA: I've got Homebrew 7 building packages from source on an Intel Mac running Monterey; nothing yet required from MacPorts and a pretty minimal patch to the installer. I'd probably want to add legacy-support from MacPorts and update the macOS build environment to add it as an extra library on Intel Macs if I were to continue.

That being said, I'm sure y'all talked about continuing to support Intel Macs as source-based and ultimately decided against it, so it's unlikely that this will be interesting to the team. But let me know if I'm wrong and I'll open a couple PRs for further discussion.

> GitHub Actions will retire Intel macOS runners in autumn 2027

But why drop before that?

Thank you for all of your hard work, I’ve been very happily using Homebrew on OS X / macOS since 2010.

No need to be sorry, the situation is understandable.

very disappointed about this

I think they would be able to support older architectures under a paid contract if absolutely needed, for the right price.

Other than that, I'm grateful for the free software.

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