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- Hacker News
- Thank you for your work on Homebrew, I use it every day. On the matter of speed and parallel downloads, how does this release compare to Zerobrew [0]?
On another note, to commenters here, I've been using brew bundle with the Brewfile more and more these days as a declarative list of all user packages installed, should I just move to Mise or Nix instead? What are the benefits and drawbacks? Last time I used Nix on my MacBook a few years ago it seemed to brick my whole system so not sure what that was about.
by satvikpendem - Most nix users still use brew for casks on mac. Using brew bundle as your interface to it makes things almost seamless, so its not too icky overall.
eg I manage my Brewfile declaratively with home-manager, and then run this on file change
HOMEBREW_NO_UPDATE_REPORT_NEW=1 HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew bundle --file="$HOME/Brewfile" --cleanup --no-upgradeby JamesSwift - Shoutout to all the people making Homebrew possible! You rock! Everyone should consider donating to the project: https://opencollective.com/homebrewby sebiw
- Homebrew 6.0.0 seems to be the first major version of brew that is heavily written using AI. There’s new document at https://docs.brew.sh/Responsible-AI-Usage that was added 11 hours ago. Do you think that these guidelines have been followed consistently since 5.0.0?by petetnt
- I would say I’ve embraced AI most heavily and I wrote this document so: yes.
I review AI written code on Homebrew the same way I review code from a no avatar GitHub user with no previous contributions.
The experimental and abandoned brew-rs frontend was more “vibe coded” using my knowledge of how to benchmark and test homebrew accurately and with a shitload of manual testing. Maybe that’s why the performance wasn’t as good as expected, who knows.
by mikemcquaid - Is Homebrew still tied to GitHub or has there been any move to provide redundancy across multiple providers?
Also coming from what I consider traditional package managers such as apt, rpm, emerge, pkg, etc. I am still confused on cans, taps, kegs, formulas, etc. Does anyone have a good and concise guide to what all these features are?
by IgorPartola - 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.
by philistine - Does brew gather statistics that could show what portion of users is on Intel vs Apple Silicon?by JSR_FDED
- A saving grace is they're perfect for linux distros.by srik
- AFAIK, github action runner for intel will be deprecated at similar period, maybe that is major reason.by daeho-ro
- 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.by sunaookami
- 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.
by mrpippy - > 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.
by mikemcquaid - 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.by stouset
- > 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.
by saghm - Personally I stopped using Homebrew after I got screwed too many times on mandatory upgrades that I couldn't pin. I use a combination of Mise and MacPorts now so I don't get any more surprise breakage and forced obsolescence. Plus Mise allows me to upgrade to any new version, whereas with Homebrew you have to wait for whenever the tap feels like upgrading (llama.cpp tap skips every 10 releases)by 0xbadcafebee
- I'm in the "switched most to Mise" stage, might look into MacPorts for the remaining stuff, thanks for the tip!by PufPufPuf
- I switched to MacPorts because of permission issues with brew, used it for years, then switched back after MacPorts inexplicably started wanting to install like 9000 packages just to install something small-ish like wget. Which is probably just as likely to happen with any other package manager but whatever.by frollogaston
- Nix is also worth checking out, even if the Darwin packaging is a bit flaky. I really appreciate having cross-platform devshells when I have to alternate between Mac and Linux on a regular basis.by bigyabai
- Glad you've found a workflow that works for you, genuinely.
For others still using Homebrew: a lot of work has gone into upgrading only when we absolutely have to and showing these upgrades to the user before we do them, including in this release.
by mikemcquaid - I was going to ask about others having this experience. I've been using MacPorts for a couple years to install developer tooling because it's far more consistent and doesn't surprise me with new major versions of Python at random. I only use Homebrew for application installation (i.e. Firefox, Slack, Spotify, etc.) that are not available in MacPorts.
Of course, I've also made a concerted effort over the years to migrate everything to uv for Python, pnpm for nodejs, etc. so maybe it's not an issue for me anymore?
by bmurphy1976 - I've moved over to MacPorts due to Homebrew's aggressive support phase-out schedule[1]. My daily driver iMac is now in the Tier-3 "go away" bucket. Absolutely loved Homebrew for the short period of time I could use it, but I'm not going to get on the hardware update treadmill just to keep using it.by ryandrake
- I recently switched back to Homebrew from Nix, and the three big factors in that switch are:
- Brew seems to have better support for the packages it has, compared to Nix where it seems a percentage of packages are not as well maintained,
- Better Mac support; some Nix packages have features disabled on macOS, I think just because the maintainers of this packages don’t have a Mac for testing,
- Better UX.
Obviously I miss the reproducibility of Nix environments and the ability to easily create my own flakes with specific packages, but on the balance, Brew has won me back. (I still like Nix, and FWIW we use Nix at work.)
by klodolph - Very glad to hear this, thanks for posting.by mikemcquaid
- I was interested in Nix because it could automate setup and configuration of macOS features. But all it does is usually run defaults or some intermediatary. In the end I stuck with brew and wrote an idempotent setupmac() function in my bash_profile (I use bash 5) with the aid of chatgpt since it knows all the cool defaults commands, and it’s pretty much solved setting up a new account or mac (alongside a Brewfile I maintain in my dotfiles). I don’t need any of those highfalutin tools.
- I use nix-darwin and also manage my homebrew packages with it. Maybe you can take a look at that.
May I ask for what do you use it at work? I have a few places I think nix might suit but I can’t really put my finger on it.
by Fethbita - Homebrew is a non-profit project run entirely by volunteers, not employees. We need your funds to pay for software, hardware and hosting around continuous integration and future improvements to the project. Every donation will be spent on making Homebrew better for our users. Please consider a regular donation through GitHub Sponsors, OpenCollective and Patreon.
I donate to a lot of open source projects that I benefit from, but I’ve never really thought about Homebrew. I will get onto it.
- I'm amazed they're not sponsored by Apple themselves, or at the very least major mac-forward Dev houses.by AussieWog93
- Thanks for the update. Is there any chance we can get some kind of cooldown mechanism in Homebrew?
The only people I want to trust to quickly ship new code to my machine are Apple and my browser (which handles more untrusted input than anything else).
For everything else (vscode and its extensions, npm, homebrew, and all the apps that self-update), I prefer to err on the side of waiting a few days.
Some exceptional 0days might warrant a cooldown bypass, but even in its current form users are vulnerable to 0days until they run brew upgrade.
by broxit - 100% need this.by cryo32