Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 7.0.0. The most significant changes since 6.0.0 are faster installations and upgrades, stronger sandboxing, a native macOS app, built-in vulnerability checks and an advisory database, the end of macOS 10.15 support and Intel Macs moving to Tier 3 (announced last year).
Literally just upgraded before seeing this post; I had 31 outdated packages and the first thing I saw was how blazing fast it was! I looked online to see if something changed and saw this post.
Speed was my biggest complaint about brew, so I'm glad to cross that one off my list of things I don't like about brew.
Thank you for your hard work BTW, brew's been a lifesaver on macOS and immutable distros.
Rewriting a program in Rust (specifically) really only makes sense for a few reasons:
1) the existing implementation is in an unsafe, cumbersome language (C, C++).
2) the existing implementation language is too slow and that slowness cannot be worked around.
3) the implementation is enormous, in a dynamic language and you desperately need stricter types. But this doesn't really favor Rust specifically.
1 doesn't apply because Ruby is garbage collected. It's doubtful 2 applies just given what homebrew does: the long pole is always going to be I/O. The performance improvements in version 7 seem to mostly be due to doing more concurrently. I highly doubt the Ruby-ness gets meaningfully in the way.
I was kinda kidding because parent called it "blazing" fast lol. I didn't think it was Rust. Blazing fast software is reserved as a descriptor for Rust programs :)
i just tested and `mise bootstrap` is over twice as fast at installing when a bottle was in the cache. other commands like `status/check` are 20-30x faster. that's without spending much work at all on perf—i'm sure i could bring these numbers down much further.
I don't know anything about homebrew, but have a question ...
I see some parallels between homebrew and Gradle ... for the longest time Gradle was using Groovy for build scripts. The Gradle / Groovy build script DSL was a little too magic and dynamically typed. It looked cute, but led to issues in developer UX (awful stack traces), tooling (documentation and autocomplete), robustness, and performance.
There are other reasons why Gradle is moving away from Groovy. I suspect that the number of people that use and know Groovy is steadily declining. Declarative Gradle, which is the future, is not Turing complete.
I can't help but notice the parallels between Gradle / Groovy and Homebrew / Ruby: using a dynamically typed Ruby DSL with Turing completeness like the olden Gradle ways, and Ruby is declining in popularity like Groovy.
I would have to imagine at some point, the people who know Ruby well enough to create / debug formulae will dwindle. What are the plans?
> I suspect that the number of people that use and know Groovy is steadily declining
One big surprise for me at a genomics/bioinformatics company was that of the three main technologies for orchestating bioinformatics workflows, Snakemake, Cromwell, and Nextflow, Nextflow was in a language based on Groovy. It took me back.
Except ~nobody uses declarative gradle in production yet, and groovy is mostly declining in favour of also turing complete Kotlin. It's yet to be discovered how declarative gradle fares and how much of imperative glue real-life projects will need
Ultimately you don’t need to know much Ruby to maintain or contribute to Homebrew. Ruby makes it very easy to write custom DSLs that don’t feel like Ruby. I didn’t really know any before working on Homebrew and it’s now my primary language.
That said, yes we have already moved away from our DSL being Turing Complete. This release drops for official taps the ability for packages to run arbitrary postinstall/uninstall/etc. Ruby in favour of DSLs and our JSON API.
This will likely get extended over time to eventually allow package definitions to themselves be in JSON.
Where do you draw the line between system packages and user facing apps? Some software defies such an easy categorization. If your default install doesn't come with docker and you install docker later for development, does that make docker a user-facing app? What about language toolchains like golang, rust, npm, etc?
> Where do you draw the line between system packages and user facing apps?
If it works in Homebrew, I almost always pick Homebrew. :) I have a pretty good feeling for what works since for the past few years I've mostly used an atomic distro (Aurora, based on Universal Blue, based on Fedora). It just comes naturally for me on Fedora too.
I've found that this way you can get many of the stability pros of using an atomic distro even on a non-atomic one.
> I've found that this way you can get many of the stability pros of using an atomic distro even on a non-atomic one.
Digression, but I’m curious since you brought it up: Are you saying that Silverblue-based distros are noticeably more stable than Fedora? Or is it more a theoretical benefit, that you believe more in the long-term stability of that architecture?
It's an interesting question on Linux. On macOS entire toolchains would be fair game. I just ran `brew install colima`, `brew install llvm`, etc.
But clearly anything that would conflict with distro-specific opinionated decisions is out. Or DE-specific opinionated decisions. Maybe a good rule is "anything that would be useful simutaneously on all *nix".
Then again I use versioned AppDirs on Linux since +20 years anyway, so I am
not really into any arbitrary disctinction random linux distributions try
to push down onto the (downstream) userbase. Besides, if you compile from source, why
would you want to rely on the distribution package manager to begin with?
None of them allow for versioned AppDirs by default as far as I know; NixOS
uses a hashed name, so that is the only exception I can think of (and GoboLinux
of course), but as far as I know if you are on e. g. a debian system, you can
not use it for a versioned AppDir layout.
> NixOS uses a hashed name, so that is the only exception I can think of (and GoboLinux of course)
Also Guix, which is inspired by Nix. Don’t know about AppDir support, though. Are AppDirs more of a general concept or a formalised standard? In what capacity are you using them?
I use "dnf" to upgrade my system and "flatpak update" and "brew upgrade" to upgrade the apps I've installed.
An app like VirtualBox does not install using Flatpak or Homebrew, so I would use dnf for that. It's usually an app or two that doesn't work via Flatpak/Homebrew/AppImage that I need to install using dnf.
would you please share what amount of the new dev (work done on brew) is AI/LLM-assisted. this major version bump was very quick to arrive compared to when v6 got released?
Thank you, very insightful. TBH, expected an actual flow of nonsense and suspicion meanwhile, but a daly later there is still none, perhaps the general sentiment already shifted enough. It also confirms the notion that the credibility of the author is more important than the credibility of the means to develop. Also, of course, we're all going to move to newer brew sooner or later, so this all effort is much appreciated.
The dedicated user isn't really required; it just expects that /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew exists. That can just be a symlink to your home directory. But yes, creating that symlink requires root on most systems. Brew itself doesn't require root or that pathname; you can put packages anywhere, but then many will have to be built from scratch since the pre-built packages don't work. And you need bubblewrap installed (which requires root) to use the sandbox, but again that is optional.
All that said, when you are running without a sandbox installing to a nonstandard location, not everything works consistently. I run this mode all the time. But it has been getting better.
See the release notes: we now have experimental support for using any prefix shorter than the Linux default. We are aiming to eventually fully support (Tier 1) any prefix under 64 bytes long.
I’d imagine they’re live updating the library paths in the binary headers, so anything shorter or equal to what they’re using is a simple rewrite, but longer is more complex.
The present is built mostly on layers of the long-past :)
It makes me think of when Arch merged /usr/bin and sbin with /bin and sbin. Having them split made sense in a ton of scenarios that used to be very common, but increasingly the split was vestigial for most users.
Yea, my understanding is that the split between / and /usr used to be more or less: the drive they used for / ran out of space, so they mounted another drive as /usr. As a consequence, / became where you put stuff that was essential during early boot, while /usr was where you put everything else.
But these days, "early boot" is handled by initramfs and we've all got drives large enough to not need the split anyway.
How long do you expect them to support Intel processors though? It’s been like 6 years since the last MacBook release had any Intel processor, and Apple doesn’t make OS updates anymore, so it doesn’t surprise me that Homebrew stopped too.
What does saying "working tech" do for you? If I have a working Samsung CRT from 25 years ago do I ping them about smart TV support? Nowadays it's a shitty situation with planned obsolescence; but 6 years for an open source project dedicating resources to a dead end is more than enough and appreciated.
NixOS is an open source project that runs great on my 2013 Dell laptop. I think the real point of distinction is that brew depends on Apple's OS and SDK, which somewhat ties their hands, while other OSs don't.
6 years is really not a long time at all. You can probably find heaps of open source software out there that compiles and runs perfectly on 20 year old PCs. It's not like the maintainer has to do much to retain support--they just have to not make the software dependent on new operating systems.
Homebrew doesn't have to lift a finger to support Intel Macs. It already does! All they have to do is not kill support for them.
Hey, it's their software, they are all volunteers and can do whatever they want. I'm grateful for the short window of time in which I was able to use their software. I don't get to decide their support period, but I will still hopelessly complain about it. "Deliberately breaking compatibility with a computer because it is old" is my biggest axe to grind with the whole software industry, and I'll shake my fists at this cloud until I die.
Software maintenance is not free, especially for a project the size of Homebrew, and it's perfectly reasonable for software to not be supported on older computers due to maintenance burden, with a good example being 32 bit processors. If you had a 32 bit processor would you expect all of your software that was supported now to be supported forever, just because it supports it now?
I would not expect the software to continue to get updates, but I would expect the software to continue to work.
I'm salty today because I tried to run Fusion 360, and found that Autodesk just out of the blue decided that 1. My computer is too old to run the software (which ran just fine a few weeks ago on the same computer); 2. That I needed to update the software, and 3. The update will not run on my "old" computer. They took software that ran fine on my computer and deliberately pulled the rug out. Fuck Autodesk. I'm spending the entire afternoon exporting dozens of files I have on their cloud, one at a time, since they apparently can't even manage to keep an existing version of the software running.
There's been a huge step up in basically everything going from intel to apple silicon. It's not a comparable hardware in any sense, and as such, it really does feel like it became a paperweight? I know I never wanted to see an intel macbook ever again the moment I tried M1. It's maybe hard to comprehend how different it is if you haven't used both. And at the same time I'm happy with my x86 desktop for 10+ years. Only thing that really improved in that span was storage.
So I wouldn't say this applies globally to apple users/products, but the post-intel era is a special case. If nothing else, they are helping the environment by not feeding that (literally) hot garbage with more electricity.
Sure, but 2019s Intel Macs are aboslutely usable for most tasks, and given much of the agentic dev. happens... somewhere remotely, it is more an opportunity to reuse this equipment for various tasks, rather than pollute the already dirty Earth with more electronic waste.
Years, honestly. After all, Intel Macs just received a major macOS release from Apple only 12 months ago. MacPorts manages to support all the way back to Leopard!
Check out MacPorts. It was the original package manager, still going strong, and it supports Macs going all the way back to the Leopard era. It also always used /opt instead of taking over /usr/bin like Homebrew.
Same here, but I understand their position. Meanwhile I rely on packages publishing builds for Intel Mac in GitHub (surprisingly a lot) or building from source code. I just asked AI to build me install system.
I recommend MacPorts, the migration is easy, you copy the package names you installed with brew, uninstall homebrew (there's an unisntall script on brew.sh FAQ section, it will also uninstall all homebrew packages (but not the casks)) then install macports and reinstall the packages with sudo port. Although the selection is smaller on macports and newer packages might not have a prebuilt pkg for your OS so you still might end up building manually (My poor i5 4core had to attempt building nodejs26 because there wasn't a pkg for Ventura)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're definitely right about that. I'll admit it. If you're not the kind of person who likes to throw all your electronics out every few years to spend $thousands on new ones then the Apple ecosystem is not for you.
It's a weird situation in that the standards for mobile devices like cell phones and tablets are on the floor compared to those for PCs, so Apple's same 6-year cutoff feels respectable for smartphones but miserly for laptops.
Uncompensated volunteers dropping support for a 7 year old device that is shortly going to be unsupported by the manufacturer isn't a rug pull.
Entitlement can be wild, volunteers are volunteers. Consumers of volunteer output are free to support their use cases themselves on their own time. Find an ARM Mac used (like an M1) and upgrade.
If it no longer is supported by software, it’s no longer perfectly good. Certainly, if you want to spend your time on supporting unsupported hardware based on personal belief, that’s a choice, and it’s your time. Compare to the cost of replacing the hardware. Time is not free, it is the ultimate non renewable resource. We are all slowly dying one day at a time, is that how you want to spend your time?
Recycle old gear when the math no longer maths and move on.
As I replied in another comment[1], it's their software, their choice. Homebrew devs are doing the volunteer work, so they get to decide the support period and when to pull the rug out. I'll still shake my fists about it, because it's personally my biggest problem with the entire software industry's attitude, not just open source.
I'm probably the millionth person to parrot this to you but my goodness you are a hero if you can tolerate the Intel Mac experience in 2026.
I thought my Intel Mac from that era was incredibly weird. Little firmware-ish things were so glitchy and sluggish. At some point the wake from sleep/lid open just took forever in ways that didn't happen on older Intel Mac models (or maybe I was going crazy). I just had this strange feeling that Apple was knowingly half-hearting their Intel drivers and products as a whole as they were putting more energy into developing Apple Silicon.
Dude, you owe it to yourself to just grab a used M2 MacBook Air or something along those lines. Treat yourself. You'll be kicking yourself for not doing so sooner. (Don't get a MacBook Neo, too many compromises including poor battery life, a used Air is much better, and if you use more than one external monitor use caution on what model/CPU you choose).
Sure, a laptop should last longer than 7 years, but this is one of those "Apple yeets out a new architecture" exceptions like the PowerPC to Intel transition. Better to accept it and move on. 7 years is still a solid run. You've only got ~2 more years left until you start losing security updates anyway.
The other machine I highly recommend is Linux/Framework 13 Pro with the Intel Core Ultra Series 3, although that's a whole different price class, and obviously not everyone can make that move in terms of software compatibility.
I sell all my previous devices on second hand markets like eBay. That question becomes "not my problem:" whoever else is buying it has some kind of use case even though I am done with the system and it no longer fits my use case anymore.
I think that, for the parent commenter to my original comment, this Intel Mac no longer fits their use case. They can fight it and suffer or get the right tool for the job. I'm sure the person who buys it from them won't care that the current version of Homebrew doesn't work on it.
Intel Macs run Linux very well, I might add.
It should also be noted that, yes, most electronics eventually get scrapped for parts and raw materials. It doesn't really take all that long for important components to fail to a point where a computer is not really worth dealing with anymore. Yes, they can be repaired in many cases, but that's only generally worth it to a small group of vintage enthusiasts (and I say this as someone who very much enjoys vintage computing myself).
If you're going to update that frequently, you may want to consider something that allows for cooldown like this [1]. I've gotten more nervous about supply-chain attacks over the last few months.
Just remember that brew still must never be installed on a machine you need to be able to trust.
The supply chain security policy of brew is basically non existent and optimized for low-friction contributions. Think wikipedia. No enforced commit signing, review signing, or multi-party release signing, and thus everything is honor system.
Do not put brew anywhere near systems that access production or even on systems used to review production-bound code.
I hate to have to be this harsh as it is clear you did a lot of work, but I have warned members of the brew team about serious gaps here multiple times over the years and seemingly nothing has been done. Brew is not anywhere close to a level of supply chain security to be allowed anywhere near production access or production code review.
Language package managers are a joke and not worth comparing to but at least we can quarantine those. No security conscious person would run NPM outside of a VM or a container with code they did not review. But brew is a system package manager so the risk is not comparable. It might be the thing that installs the VM or container tools in the first place, so users have little way to protect themselves.
Your setup is based on the honor system and it is important people know that so they do not use it on any system they need to be able to trust.
If I were to create a fake identity and contribute my way to becoming a brew maintainer, I would have the power to create yet another pseudonym to submit malicious code that I "review" and merge.
Or since builds are mostly not reproducible a compromise of a single CI/CD pipeline could inject a trusting trust attack into a dependency of a dependency of the compiler, and then I own every downstream system that uses brew forever even after version updates.
Or maybe I compromised the github credentials of a single engineer and did a merge as them at the right moment when they were doing a bunch of others to get it lost in the noise. Without signing impersonation is easy.
I would not actually do any of these things, but someone else could have already, a year ago.
You will never solve any of these holes without full source bootstrapping, deterministic builds, mandating every maintainer sign every commit, and review with a well known and pinned keys individually controlled on smartcards, and then also sign every binary artifact with multiple keys after independent reproducible builds.
This is the bare minimum for a system package manager. Comparing ourselves to others does not cut it anymore, because patient humans and AI bots will absolutely take advantage of honor system security models.
Implying brew is secure enough for production use is going to get people hurt.
A responsible system package manager must trust no single human, no single credential, and no single machine.
I had jumped into chats and a github issue as I recall, probably 7-8 years ago based on the employer I was researching it for, but would be hard to track that down now.
Anyway, my tone may not be entirely constructive, but it is one of frustration as seemingly no one is taking supply chain attacks seriously anywhere I look. I am quite sure if homebrew was backdoored, it would give an attacker control of production systems of countless financial companies, defense contractors, healthcare providers, AI labs. I think it is insane they trust rando homebrew maintainers with that much power, but they do and they are probably not going to stop because they do not even understand these risks, and there are not practical alternatives to brew on MacOS.
So that puts some major responsibility on the Homebrew team to either warn people to stop using it in high risk environments, or manage homebrew in a way appropriate for those environments.
Stagex actually does every single thing I am recommending Homebrew do, and with a way smaller team. What we do is also nowhere near enough, but the bar is in hell.
Those are also all just as bad but you can at least run those fully in containers or vms and never let them touch your host system.
Brew however is a system level package manager so it is expected to install your top level tools with substantial privilege, so for using it on a production capable system you would want maintainer signed commits, maintainer signed reviews, and 2+ maintainer signed reproducible builds, all with well known long lived keys controlled by smartcards of each maintainer on high trust systems.
I am not just talking out of my ass here. We do all of the above in stagex because it is the bare minimum.
They are all significant risks, and we pay significant money to JFrog for their X-ray product to scan and alert on bad dependencies, and significant internal tooling to track which package was used on which developer enclaves.
I found that Mise handles all my needs for development and it is scoped so it doesn't try to update Python and break all my virtual env when I install something new /shrug
I split my usage. Homebrew for OS things mise for the various tooling.
The only problem some things still have a dependency on requiring python and others on the system. The problem being that they’re there, mise works just fine.
So is sudo... And that's not "too risky" for the entire industry.
That's not to say bus factor is irrelevant (I personally think about it a lot when choosing software projects), but truthfully the bus factor here especially doesn't matter much, as mise is an easy tool to replace (with asdf, for example) if something goes wrong with it eventually.
I highly recommend trying it out. I resisted using it for some time, but it solved some pain points I had with NodeJS, Ruby, and Python regarding installation.
this makes no sense to me, the reason i don't give anyone else the commit bit is only to _protect_ the supply chain. you should want as few people with that access as possible.
I think the concern is more if something happens to you or stop development for any reason, then the project is dead or would fork in a few separate directions
True, but Python is the one with an env management system (virtual environments) which is the most prone to breakage for projects that depend on system Python.
Uv is far superior to both Mise and Homebrew for Python work, and I find that it removes the vast majority of pain preventing me from using Homebrew by default for most things, and Mise only occasionally for specific dev envs. Mise is a great tool though!
> have a system python binary and virtual envs linked to it
I'm not sure if you're saying avoid using system python?
In my experience so far, you never want to develop complex software locked to system versions of runtimes. Too often you need a bleeding edge feature, or conversely need to postpone updating due to needing an old version for some reason.
I don’t get these questions asking if it’s codex or Claude – I see them often. Does it matter? There are other options out there also, it feels strange to ask this. Like asking “is your car a Toyota or a BMW?“
If you say "AI tools", some vibe-coders try to equivocate between tools that generate the whole program for you and, like, an editor that uses an scoring algorithm to decide which method to show at the top of an autocomplete list. But if you say "vibe coding", some vibe-coders try to claim that what they're doing technically isn't vibe coding because they applied some non-zero amount of testing or review during the process.
If you ask "did you build this using Codex or Claude", it removes most of the wiggle room. And it's worded pretty neutrally, so it will often get vibe-coders who aren't technically using either of those tools to say something like, "Actually, I've built a custom harness for DeepSeek..." instead of an outright denial.
Long term it matters very much if your car is Toyota or BMW or Kia or John Deere though.
I think some users are also conscious about the longevity of their tooling related to LLM usage, too. Whether it has an effect or not, we've yet to find out.
I think it's because LLMs tend to obsessively write in a this-therefore-that kind of way, where an emdash is often the most semantically fitting punctuation.
Apple devices produce a ton of emdashes; "Smart Punctuation" is enabled by default on iOS and iPadOS, maybe Mac as well - and it's at least a decade old.
I've had to disable it on all my iDevices bc it breaks some Markdown parsers. How big a % of training data was produced on an Apple device? Ehhhhh probably small.
I was surprised to see my Homebrew consider my macOS a Tier 2 for using the very latest macOS version and Xcode version… But I think it's because I don't have Xcode 27.0, which is presumably releasing tomorrow?
Yup! We’ve been using it for a really long time at this point.
Were using Bubblewrap on Linux and moved to Landlock this release.
P.S. HUGE fan of your blog and writing Simon, keep up the great work. It’s the #1 resource I recommend to anyone in the industry wanting to learn more about LLMs (and pelicans).
As a MacPorts users (generally light-weight, just a few things here and there):
Has anyone gone from MP to HB, or vice versa? Why did you switch from one to the other (and perhaps back again)? What did you find as the pros/cons of each?
I switched from Homebrew to MacPorts a few years ago because of Homebrew's aggressive dropping of macOS versions they consider "too old." Even in the top-comment announcement here[1] they are making sure to include that they are removing support, as if they're proud of it!
MacPorts generally doesn't care what version of macOS you run, so here I am. I'll probably never go back to Homebrew. MP is great!
Yes, the pride in aggressively dropping support for Macs that just received a major OS release from Apple only 12 months ago (and they were selling just three years ago) is a little off-putting.
I switched from MP to Homebrew over a decade ago. At the time, Homebrew was less finicky and better at resolving dependency conflicts. It was a lot easier to get a system running MacPorts into a an irretrievably borked state. Not long after, Homebrew install instructions became ubiquitous, whereas with MacPorts it seemed like you always had to figure it out for yourself — if the package was even available, which it more often wasn’t.
Haven’t used MacPorts since. Has it gotten any better at those things?
I switched from brew to macports, and I have not experienced the first problem at all. In fact, I had more problems with brew, where some package needed to be updated that I did not want, and I caused a cascade of issues.
The second has also never happened to me. macports installs the packages into a separate prefix, and you just add that to the path, so I wonder how it could bork irretrievably.
Regarding instructions: for most packages, I found that just replacing `brew` with `sudo port` is enough, as most ports are available. And quite a few install instructions mention homebrew together with macports. I have not run into missing packages, but sometimes the ones that existed were a little out of date.
I switched from macports to homebrew a decade ago. I needed the lastest version of a program, and I found homebrew updated formulas faster than macports did
I use basically every general-purpose package manager available on macOS simultaneously in a kind of tiered hierarchy of preference.
Homebrew's best differentiated strength imo is the whole Cask subsystem, which basically automates GUI app installs via "first-party" artifacts like .dmg and .pkg files. That's what I still sometimes use it for even though I have other package managers available, including MacPorts, that I prefer for most other things.
The ordering goes something like the following: Nix > pkgsrc > MacPorts > Homebrew > mas (CLI frontend for the App Store).
Each kinda has its niche. Nix is just generally preferable for me, and it covers all of my needs 99% of the time. It also happens to be pretty fast in terms of actual installation even if evaluating the Nix code can be slow for complex projects.
For proper development toolchains, it's all Nix all the time. Those are per-project rather than global, and what can't be managed by Nix isn't managed at all. Nix is this an overriding constraint there, which has never really been a problem for me.
Pkgsrc is good for development tools and terminal apps, but Nix is generally even better for those, so for me it's just an escape hatch in case something is broken or missing in Nixpkgs and I'm too lazy to fix it, or I genuinely want some library installed with its headers findable globally (rare, because that's mostly bad practice imo). Also good if I want a backup copy of an exotic shell or something in case I want to rm -rf /nix and not be forced back into Bash or zsh, which is nice when I'm working on my macOS bootstrap scripts. On macOS, everything you install via Pkgsrc will be a binary install, so it's relatively fast and its performance is relatively predictable.
MacPorts is broadly useful so it's useful for the same things as Pkgsrc, but it's also better at providing GUI Mac apps, built from source. For a while I got Emacs here when Emacs in Nixpkgs had a problem building with native compilation support, for example. Also good for my macOS bootstrap scripts since they're written in literate style in Org mode; it can be nice to have a working Emacs to dump them to disk with even without Nix if I'm iterating on them. MacPorts often ends up building stuff from source on my system, which can be slow, but I don't care because I have very little installed via MacPorts.
Homebrew historically didn't feel "safe" for me for development dependencies for various reasons. Before sandboxing support, running and installing and managing things as your own user felt especially unsafe from a security perspective. Now it's a lot better, but it still feels wrong to have global-ish prefixes owned by a particular user. The aggressive in-place upgrades also feel quite brittle for development dependencies, but to some extent that's true of anything that's not project-local. I also don't like that installing GUI apps with Homebrew can end up putting binaries related to their dependencies and not needed at runtime into my PATH— that feels way messier than what I get with Nix. It can also historically be very slow for what it does, but if you're using it in the recommended way, you don't often have to build from source so you can still expect a faster experience than with MacPorts even though both nominally support binary packages.
All that said, Homebrew shines when it comes to extremely broad support for arbitrary Mac apps, often including proprietary ones, and support for the arbitrary range of installation procedures that macOS app developers expect you to use. It's also very good in terms of freshness for macOS packages. Nix is competitive in that respect, but none of the others remotely are. The stuff I don't like about where Homebrew puts things and the filesystem permissions are also fixable if you use a custom prefix. That's officially unsupported and means you can't use "bottles" (i.e., you'll need to build packages that aren't "casks" from source), but it works fine and has been totally stable for many years. If you understand some basic Unix norms and how to compile software from source, you should feel comfortable doing it.
I also like to keep Homebrew's bin/ paths off my PATH, and selectively symlink or wrap binaries installed via Homebrew back to ~/.local/bin by hand. That way I can install whatever I want via Homebrew without worrying about it getting unexpectedly involved in my development processes or command-line environment.
Because Homebrew has historically been so slow for me, I've tried to install as little with it as possible, which means installing even some Mac GUI apps via Nix. That's kind of a pain because if you want Spotlight to pick them up, you need little trampoline wrapper apps because it won't register symlinks into the Nix store. And when Nixpkgs' selection is lacking, you can extend it with brew-nix, which uses Homebrew's JSON API to automatically generate Nix packages. They work, but some apps just can't do everything they're designed to from the Nix store due to macOS limitations/security policies, so you have to kind of figure out which you can install via Nix yourself. It's extra machinery, and so if Homebrew is faster enough now I may look forward to dropping it and just using Homebrew as my first choice for all GUI apps.
The App Store sucks, needless to say, not least of all because it requires an active login to a large tech company. I only use it for VPN apps or security software where Apple forces me to.
I don't recommend my setup to people for whom package managers aren't a first-class interest, but it is perfectly stable and it's unlikely to get you into trouble.
I think most people would be served well by combininations of two package managers, of one of two forms: Nix + an escape hatch or Homebrew + a development toolchain manager.
For people who like macOS' app installation procedures: Nix + pkgsrc
For people who like Nix but want a disciplined escape hatch: Nix + MacPorts
For people who like Nix and want absolute coverage: Nix + Homebrew
For people who don't really care about how their package manager works but are developers: Homebrew + mise or Homebrew + Nix
For non-developers who just want an automated/centralized way to install software aside from the App Store: Homebrew (and probably especially the GUI)
I think the main thing for me is just that no one should have free-floating, ambient development dependencies. You shouldn't have some software project that depends on what version of Python is on your PATH or what packages from PyPI are globally installed via pip or whatever. You shouldn't be manually building unoconv or pandoc or something against some LibreOffice headers that live in /usr/local or /opt/local or anywhere like that. Ideally, shouldn't be doing `make install` anywhere— if you need to compile something for your own use, compile it by writing a package (or having an LLM write it, you lazy bum). If you observe that kind of basic package management hygiene, "switching" is largely trivial and doesn't involve any manual cleanup or fixing.
And if you spend a few minutes thinking about a preference order that you like and configure your PATH accordingly, all of these package managers can coexist so that you can "switch" gradually, at your leisure.
I reluctantly switched from MacPorts to Homebrew around 2014. At that time Homebrew had that yuck factor by recommending it be installed into /usr/local rather than /opt. But still, I switched because there were more formulae in HB than ports in MP. And it turns out that the Homebrew install location is customizable anyways.
Always a joy to see security and performance as a big highlight on a release. Brew is notably slow compared to the other package managers I use, but never in an unbearable way.
I've always used it on my Mac work machines, but always used my native package managers on Linux. What are the reasons to run homebrew on Linux? Better newer package support when you're on something slower moving like a Debian distro?
I've standardized my config scripts on using language managers for those tools (go, cargo, uv), which isn't perfect, so maybe brew is worth a chance.
An LLM helped with the initial tedium of rewording 1000s of PRs from maintainer centric language into user centric language. It was reviewed and edited (by a human) probably >20 times. Go look at the PR if you don’t believe me.
I used to do these all by hand and they took me multiple hours. I still probably spent over an hour, including a bunch of time on a family holiday today. Comments like this make me wonder why I bother sometimes.
FWIW, I also got a bit of an LLM vibe skimming the changelog. In particular, the section about Linux sandboxing jumped out at me:
> Status in 7.0.0: kernels without Landlock continue working without Linux sandboxing in the less secure pre-6.0.0 configuration; brew doctor reports missing protection as an advisory.
> No replacement opt-out; unavailable Landlock remains advisory.
With that being said, I can kind of see why "eliminate all traces of AI writing styles" wouldn't be a goal of the review/editing process. I've been out of the Apple ecosystem for a while, but I imagine Homebrew has enthusiastically adopted LLMs for a lot of tasks. If the public communications reflect that, then people who don't like LLMs can bounce immediately, rather than getting invested in the project and feeling betrayed later.
homebrew is a critical, important piece of software, and I appreciate the effort.
I certainly don’t appreciate the non-effort from reflexive LLM-haters. We get it. You don’t like LLMs. Try to have an opinion and a personality that doesn’t revolve around nitpicking AI writing.
We have a Landlock (formerly Bubblewrap) Linux sandbox due to an LLM. It sat unfixed on our roadmap for almost a decade. I and at least one other maintainer (as well as several LLMs) reviewed every line of code.
Homebrew has never been better performant, secure, tested, linted and typed. I understand the LLM dubiousness (I used to share it myself) but we’re the type of project where it’s very easy to get agents to do sensible end-to-end testing and review a nice language (Ruby). Just us on our outputs, not just our inputs.
One of our former maintainers was in high school when working on Homebrew. I’m sure many people would have found that worrying. His code was great, though (I reviewed most of it) and he made the project better. Same ultimately with LLMs. Your mileage may vary.
I prefer to use Mise for everything nowadays. homebrew bootstrap specifically. A lot easier to manage all of my packages in one single file, homebrew, Node packages, etc.
I migrated our monorepo to use mise with bootstrap and mise-tasks. I was able to delete a whole heap of setup scripts and our brewfile. First time setup is extremely simple now and re-running for updates is blazing fast.
I've been using homebrew for so long, I can't tell you how much it has helped me to spend more hours developing and less managing packages and updates, etc. Thank you so much, congratulations on the update!
does it self-uninstall cleanly (i.e. without leaving a footprint behind) yet? if not I don’t care about this or the next ‘upgrade’, and I can’t believe Homebrew project leaders push upgrades without addressing this basic flaw.
Yes. If/when it doesn’t: it’s a bug and we’ll fix it. We can’t fix things people don’t report. Also: this is open source: you also could choose to fix it. Unsurprisingly the Homebrew maintainers do not spend a lot of their time uninstalling Homebrew.
Excellent update, very speedy on upgrades now. Amazing what a little (safe) concurrency will do.
Homebrew.app, however, has a show-stopper for me. "Failed to decode Homebrew JSON output" on the installed/upgrades panel. I'm guessing the Discover panel would normally indicate which Formulae/Casks are already installed, but because it couldn't parse the JSON output, that feature (if it exists) doesn't work.
I'll file an issue—I know HN isn't your bug tracker :)
Edit: there's an issue there already, and I sorted out the root cause: iTerm2's shell integration. If you're using zsh as your shell, the solution is here [^0] in the second comment.
Congrats on the release @mikemcquaid. I like how the trusted taps feature could be opted into early. It made it easier to migrate my setup before it became compulsory. Hope big changes like that can keep the same flow. Keep up the great work!
I’ve really been enjoying nix as my package manager on macos. It’s on a separate volume so feels even more isolated from clobbering my macos and has, in my uninformed opinion, better sandboxing and reproducible builds
[OP] mikemcquaid | 19 hours ago
d3Xt3r | 18 hours ago
Speed was my biggest complaint about brew, so I'm glad to cross that one off my list of things I don't like about brew.
Thank you for your hard work BTW, brew's been a lifesaver on macOS and immutable distros.
[OP] mikemcquaid | 18 hours ago
bitexploder | 12 hours ago
staplung | 11 hours ago
Rewriting a program in Rust (specifically) really only makes sense for a few reasons:
1) the existing implementation is in an unsafe, cumbersome language (C, C++).
2) the existing implementation language is too slow and that slowness cannot be worked around.
3) the implementation is enormous, in a dynamic language and you desperately need stricter types. But this doesn't really favor Rust specifically.
1 doesn't apply because Ruby is garbage collected. It's doubtful 2 applies just given what homebrew does: the long pole is always going to be I/O. The performance improvements in version 7 seem to mostly be due to doing more concurrently. I highly doubt the Ruby-ness gets meaningfully in the way.
bitexploder | 10 hours ago
jdxcode | 4 hours ago
lukeify | 18 hours ago
lifty | 16 hours ago
sillywalk | 16 hours ago
Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus (fishshell.com)
906 points by jdxcode on Dec 28, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 198 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535217
[OP] mikemcquaid | 15 hours ago
The lessons learned were instead used to make the Ruby frontend much faster.
clumsysmurf | 11 hours ago
I see some parallels between homebrew and Gradle ... for the longest time Gradle was using Groovy for build scripts. The Gradle / Groovy build script DSL was a little too magic and dynamically typed. It looked cute, but led to issues in developer UX (awful stack traces), tooling (documentation and autocomplete), robustness, and performance.
There are other reasons why Gradle is moving away from Groovy. I suspect that the number of people that use and know Groovy is steadily declining. Declarative Gradle, which is the future, is not Turing complete.
I can't help but notice the parallels between Gradle / Groovy and Homebrew / Ruby: using a dynamically typed Ruby DSL with Turing completeness like the olden Gradle ways, and Ruby is declining in popularity like Groovy.
I would have to imagine at some point, the people who know Ruby well enough to create / debug formulae will dwindle. What are the plans?
robertlagrant | 11 hours ago
One big surprise for me at a genomics/bioinformatics company was that of the three main technologies for orchestating bioinformatics workflows, Snakemake, Cromwell, and Nextflow, Nextflow was in a language based on Groovy. It took me back.
hn8726 | 10 hours ago
[OP] mikemcquaid | 9 hours ago
That said, yes we have already moved away from our DSL being Turing Complete. This release drops for official taps the ability for packages to run arbitrary postinstall/uninstall/etc. Ruby in favour of DSLs and our JSON API.
This will likely get extended over time to eventually allow package definitions to themselves be in JSON.
reaperhulk | 15 hours ago
https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7755#issuecomment-51...
mikae1 | 16 hours ago
For me the distro package manager is for system packages, Homebrew and Flatpak for the user facing apps.
curt15 | 15 hours ago
mikae1 | 15 hours ago
If it works in Homebrew, I almost always pick Homebrew. :) I have a pretty good feeling for what works since for the past few years I've mostly used an atomic distro (Aurora, based on Universal Blue, based on Fedora). It just comes naturally for me on Fedora too.
I've found that this way you can get many of the stability pros of using an atomic distro even on a non-atomic one.
setopt | 9 hours ago
Digression, but I’m curious since you brought it up: Are you saying that Silverblue-based distros are noticeably more stable than Fedora? Or is it more a theoretical benefit, that you believe more in the long-term stability of that architecture?
nxobject | 11 hours ago
But clearly anything that would conflict with distro-specific opinionated decisions is out. Or DE-specific opinionated decisions. Maybe a good rule is "anything that would be useful simutaneously on all *nix".
shevy-java | 15 hours ago
Then again I use versioned AppDirs on Linux since +20 years anyway, so I am not really into any arbitrary disctinction random linux distributions try to push down onto the (downstream) userbase. Besides, if you compile from source, why would you want to rely on the distribution package manager to begin with?
None of them allow for versioned AppDirs by default as far as I know; NixOS uses a hashed name, so that is the only exception I can think of (and GoboLinux of course), but as far as I know if you are on e. g. a debian system, you can not use it for a versioned AppDir layout.
F3nd0 | 14 hours ago
Also Guix, which is inspired by Nix. Don’t know about AppDir support, though. Are AppDirs more of a general concept or a formalised standard? In what capacity are you using them?
salvesefu | 10 hours ago
mikae1 | 14 hours ago
Distinction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683258
I use "dnf" to upgrade my system and "flatpak update" and "brew upgrade" to upgrade the apps I've installed.
An app like VirtualBox does not install using Flatpak or Homebrew, so I would use dnf for that. It's usually an app or two that doesn't work via Flatpak/Homebrew/AppImage that I need to install using dnf.
LeBit | 12 hours ago
c0_0p_ | 2 hours ago
darkamaul | 15 hours ago
I would think this is one of the most critical dependency that you would not want to get right away at let it rest for a couple of days
[OP] mikemcquaid | 15 hours ago
Our model is very different to those where cooldowns exist and make sense. As-is if would just delay security updates too.
larodi | 14 hours ago
[OP] mikemcquaid | 14 hours ago
https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/AgentIDE
I actually wrote my own “Agent IDE” to make this prompt/review/push flow easier.
larodi | 8 hours ago
threecheese | 5 hours ago
`The macOS deployment target is set to 27.0, but the range of supported ....`
Golden Gate AAAAAARRRGGGHHHHHH
Just another few days, right? :)
jdorfman | 13 hours ago
e40 | 8 hours ago
touwer | 16 hours ago
roger_ | 16 hours ago
That really put me off.
wscott | 16 hours ago
All that said, when you are running without a sandbox installing to a nonstandard location, not everything works consistently. I run this mode all the time. But it has been getting better.
trallnag | 16 hours ago
dghlsakjg | 16 hours ago
It uses root once to chown its prefix directory /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew
[OP] mikemcquaid | 15 hours ago
mort96 | 15 hours ago
orf | 14 hours ago
Postgres is an example of this: the various directories are set at build time.
akerl_ | 14 hours ago
mort96 | 14 hours ago
It's so annoying how deeply UNIX packaging philosophy assumes that installation directories are something you hard-code at build time.
akerl_ | 14 hours ago
It makes me think of when Arch merged /usr/bin and sbin with /bin and sbin. Having them split made sense in a ton of scenarios that used to be very common, but increasingly the split was vestigial for most users.
mort96 | 13 hours ago
But these days, "early boot" is handled by initramfs and we've all got drives large enough to not need the split anyway.
yjftsjthsd-h | 13 hours ago
hk1337 | 15 hours ago
yard2010 | 16 hours ago
basedpolymer | 16 hours ago
I'm back to the old installation methods !
yladiz | 16 hours ago
basiliobeltran | 16 hours ago
I am already looking at Linux, but still need to get out of the Apple ecosystem. I am not going to spend +2500 Euros every 5 years on a laptop
lnenad | 15 hours ago
mrpippy | 13 hours ago
watermelon0 | 15 hours ago
I'm not blaming the Homebrew project/developers here, but the fact that many people are okay with deprecating perfectly fine hardware.
nebezb | 13 hours ago
yjftsjthsd-h | 13 hours ago
ryandrake | 12 hours ago
Bits don't rot.
richwater | 10 hours ago
ryandrake | 8 hours ago
Hey, it's their software, they are all volunteers and can do whatever they want. I'm grateful for the short window of time in which I was able to use their software. I don't get to decide their support period, but I will still hopelessly complain about it. "Deliberately breaking compatibility with a computer because it is old" is my biggest axe to grind with the whole software industry, and I'll shake my fists at this cloud until I die.
yladiz | 5 hours ago
ryandrake | 5 hours ago
I'm salty today because I tried to run Fusion 360, and found that Autodesk just out of the blue decided that 1. My computer is too old to run the software (which ran just fine a few weeks ago on the same computer); 2. That I needed to update the software, and 3. The update will not run on my "old" computer. They took software that ran fine on my computer and deliberately pulled the rug out. Fuck Autodesk. I'm spending the entire afternoon exporting dozens of files I have on their cloud, one at a time, since they apparently can't even manage to keep an existing version of the software running.
vor_ | 3 hours ago
threecheese | an hour ago
vor_ | 3 hours ago
nebezb | 13 minutes ago
And if you want new bits with the new features, those aren’t the same bits and that work isn’t free.
VCFundedGenYer | 13 hours ago
rplnt | 13 hours ago
So I wouldn't say this applies globally to apple users/products, but the post-intel era is a special case. If nothing else, they are helping the environment by not feeding that (literally) hot garbage with more electricity.
trvz | 14 hours ago
larodi | 14 hours ago
trvz | 10 hours ago
2) using an Intel Mac as your main computer, for most tasks != using it as a home server
vor_ | 3 hours ago
wltr | 16 hours ago
mikae1 | 16 hours ago
If you want to continue using the same MacBook that will be only path forward when Apple decides to EOL it (if it hasn't already happened).
I'm a long time Homebrew on Linux user, it works really well. I always prefer it over the distro supplied package manager for user facing CLI apps.
sethops1 | 13 hours ago
vor_ | 3 hours ago
daliusd | 16 hours ago
Achterlangs | 15 hours ago
wpm | 14 hours ago
asimovDev | 14 hours ago
ActionHank | 14 hours ago
supriyo-biswas | 13 hours ago
Apart from the issue of having to compile the downloaded software leading to spinning fans, I'm not too concerned.
VCFundedGenYer | 13 hours ago
asadhaider | 16 hours ago
bessbd | 9 hours ago
mwpmaybe | 9 hours ago
aydgn | 16 hours ago
- 2019 Intel iMac user.
[OP] mikemcquaid | 15 hours ago
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.
eu | 15 hours ago
xtracto | 11 hours ago
Other than that, I'm grateful for the free software.
jezek2 | 14 hours ago
sethaurus | 13 hours ago
vor_ | 3 hours ago
kps | 13 hours ago
isityettime | 9 hours ago
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.
frumplestlatz | 6 hours ago
donatj | 14 hours ago
Linux already has world class package managers.
[OP] mikemcquaid | 14 hours ago
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).
Grombobulous | 10 hours ago
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.
michaelsbradley | 13 hours ago
No need to be sorry, the situation is understandable.
mwpmaybe | 9 hours ago
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.
eviks | 6 hours ago
But why drop before that?
kps | 13 hours ago
michaelsbradley | 13 hours ago
When I eventually upgrade my hardware, I’ll happily use Homebrew again. In the meantime, MacPorts!
ryandrake | 13 hours ago
dghkk | 12 hours ago
isityettime | 11 hours ago
ryandrake | 5 hours ago
isityettime | 4 hours ago
toomuchtodo | 9 hours ago
Entitlement can be wild, volunteers are volunteers. Consumers of volunteer output are free to support their use cases themselves on their own time. Find an ARM Mac used (like an M1) and upgrade.
tonyedgecombe | 9 hours ago
And throw away perfectly good hardware.
toomuchtodo | 9 hours ago
Recycle old gear when the math no longer maths and move on.
tonyedgecombe | 6 hours ago
Mindless consumption isn't going to extend your life.
toomuchtodo | 6 hours ago
mixmastamyk | 8 hours ago
ryandrake | 8 hours ago
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687331
jcastro | 7 hours ago
Grombobulous | 10 hours ago
I thought my Intel Mac from that era was incredibly weird. Little firmware-ish things were so glitchy and sluggish. At some point the wake from sleep/lid open just took forever in ways that didn't happen on older Intel Mac models (or maybe I was going crazy). I just had this strange feeling that Apple was knowingly half-hearting their Intel drivers and products as a whole as they were putting more energy into developing Apple Silicon.
Dude, you owe it to yourself to just grab a used M2 MacBook Air or something along those lines. Treat yourself. You'll be kicking yourself for not doing so sooner. (Don't get a MacBook Neo, too many compromises including poor battery life, a used Air is much better, and if you use more than one external monitor use caution on what model/CPU you choose).
Sure, a laptop should last longer than 7 years, but this is one of those "Apple yeets out a new architecture" exceptions like the PowerPC to Intel transition. Better to accept it and move on. 7 years is still a solid run. You've only got ~2 more years left until you start losing security updates anyway.
The other machine I highly recommend is Linux/Framework 13 Pro with the Intel Core Ultra Series 3, although that's a whole different price class, and obviously not everyone can make that move in terms of software compatibility.
eu | 9 hours ago
mixmastamyk | 7 hours ago
Grombobulous | 7 hours ago
I think that, for the parent commenter to my original comment, this Intel Mac no longer fits their use case. They can fight it and suffer or get the right tool for the job. I'm sure the person who buys it from them won't care that the current version of Homebrew doesn't work on it.
Intel Macs run Linux very well, I might add.
It should also be noted that, yes, most electronics eventually get scrapped for parts and raw materials. It doesn't really take all that long for important components to fail to a point where a computer is not really worth dealing with anymore. Yes, they can be repaired in many cases, but that's only generally worth it to a small group of vintage enthusiasts (and I say this as someone who very much enjoys vintage computing myself).
mediumsmart | 8 hours ago
welcome. - 2015 intel macbook user
vor_ | 3 hours ago
AbuAssar | 16 hours ago
it can be installed with:
brew install homebrew-app
max979 | 16 hours ago
inatreecrown2 | 15 hours ago
Run it every couple of days, easy peasy.
x3n0ph3n3 | 10 hours ago
1. https://github.com/whoschek/homebrew-cooldown
inatreecrown2 | 5 hours ago
x3n0ph3n3 | 4 hours ago
lrvick | 15 hours ago
The supply chain security policy of brew is basically non existent and optimized for low-friction contributions. Think wikipedia. No enforced commit signing, review signing, or multi-party release signing, and thus everything is honor system.
Do not put brew anywhere near systems that access production or even on systems used to review production-bound code.
[OP] mikemcquaid | 15 hours ago
We take supply chain security very seriously, moreso than many package managers.
lrvick | 9 hours ago
Language package managers are a joke and not worth comparing to but at least we can quarantine those. No security conscious person would run NPM outside of a VM or a container with code they did not review. But brew is a system package manager so the risk is not comparable. It might be the thing that installs the VM or container tools in the first place, so users have little way to protect themselves.
Your setup is based on the honor system and it is important people know that so they do not use it on any system they need to be able to trust.
If I were to create a fake identity and contribute my way to becoming a brew maintainer, I would have the power to create yet another pseudonym to submit malicious code that I "review" and merge.
Or since builds are mostly not reproducible a compromise of a single CI/CD pipeline could inject a trusting trust attack into a dependency of a dependency of the compiler, and then I own every downstream system that uses brew forever even after version updates.
Or maybe I compromised the github credentials of a single engineer and did a merge as them at the right moment when they were doing a bunch of others to get it lost in the noise. Without signing impersonation is easy.
I would not actually do any of these things, but someone else could have already, a year ago.
You will never solve any of these holes without full source bootstrapping, deterministic builds, mandating every maintainer sign every commit, and review with a well known and pinned keys individually controlled on smartcards, and then also sign every binary artifact with multiple keys after independent reproducible builds.
This is the bare minimum for a system package manager. Comparing ourselves to others does not cut it anymore, because patient humans and AI bots will absolutely take advantage of honor system security models.
Implying brew is secure enough for production use is going to get people hurt.
A responsible system package manager must trust no single human, no single credential, and no single machine.
woodruffw | 5 hours ago
If you have concrete concerns, please bring them to us. Vague concerns and hand-waving about “people getting hurt” isn’t appropriate or productive.
lrvick | an hour ago
Anyway, my tone may not be entirely constructive, but it is one of frustration as seemingly no one is taking supply chain attacks seriously anywhere I look. I am quite sure if homebrew was backdoored, it would give an attacker control of production systems of countless financial companies, defense contractors, healthcare providers, AI labs. I think it is insane they trust rando homebrew maintainers with that much power, but they do and they are probably not going to stop because they do not even understand these risks, and there are not practical alternatives to brew on MacOS.
So that puts some major responsibility on the Homebrew team to either warn people to stop using it in high risk environments, or manage homebrew in a way appropriate for those environments.
Stagex actually does every single thing I am recommending Homebrew do, and with a way smaller team. What we do is also nowhere near enough, but the bar is in hell.
dezgeg | 14 hours ago
lrvick | 10 hours ago
Brew however is a system level package manager so it is expected to install your top level tools with substantial privilege, so for using it on a production capable system you would want maintainer signed commits, maintainer signed reviews, and 2+ maintainer signed reproducible builds, all with well known long lived keys controlled by smartcards of each maintainer on high trust systems.
I am not just talking out of my ass here. We do all of the above in stagex because it is the bare minimum.
angry_octet | 6 hours ago
x3n0ph3n3 | 10 hours ago
Sytten | 15 hours ago
hk1337 | 15 hours ago
The only problem some things still have a dependency on requiring python and others on the system. The problem being that they’re there, mise works just fine.
impulser_ | 9 hours ago
This is all you have to add to the config file:
[bootstrap.packages]
"brew:git" = "latest"
"brew-cask:ghostty" = "latest"
threecheese | an hour ago
9dev | 15 hours ago
atmosx | 13 hours ago
9dev | 13 hours ago
doodlesdev | 13 hours ago
That's not to say bus factor is irrelevant (I personally think about it a lot when choosing software projects), but truthfully the bus factor here especially doesn't matter much, as mise is an easy tool to replace (with asdf, for example) if something goes wrong with it eventually.
I highly recommend trying it out. I resisted using it for some time, but it solved some pain points I had with NodeJS, Ruby, and Python regarding installation.
jdxcode | 13 hours ago
OberstKrueger | 12 hours ago
weaksauce | 10 hours ago
jdxcode | 10 hours ago
zbentley | 10 hours ago
Uv is far superior to both Mise and Homebrew for Python work, and I find that it removes the vast majority of pain preventing me from using Homebrew by default for most things, and Mise only occasionally for specific dev envs. Mise is a great tool though!
e12e | 4 hours ago
Probably wouldn't:
https://mise.jdx.dev/mise-cookbook/python.html#mise-uv
> have a system python binary and virtual envs linked to it
I'm not sure if you're saying avoid using system python?
In my experience so far, you never want to develop complex software locked to system versions of runtimes. Too often you need a bleeding edge feature, or conversely need to postpone updating due to needing an old version for some reason.
bodash | 15 hours ago
artdigital | 14 hours ago
Eg: mise use -g gcloud instead of brew install xxx
It can even do that for npm packages! Like mise use -g npm:xxx
llimllib | 12 hours ago
jdxcode | 11 hours ago
acedTrex | 13 hours ago
kstrauser | 12 hours ago
zymhan | 11 hours ago
gdevenyi | 15 hours ago
[OP] mikemcquaid | 14 hours ago
We hope to allow all prefixes under 64 bytes in future.
internet2000 | 14 hours ago
Is it Claude or Codex built?
illiac786 | 14 hours ago
csande17 | 13 hours ago
If you ask "did you build this using Codex or Claude", it removes most of the wiggle room. And it's worded pretty neutrally, so it will often get vibe-coders who aren't technically using either of those tools to say something like, "Actually, I've built a custom harness for DeepSeek..." instead of an outright denial.
tbeseda | 11 hours ago
I think some users are also conscious about the longevity of their tooling related to LLM usage, too. Whether it has an effect or not, we've yet to find out.
illiac786 | 11 hours ago
[OP] mikemcquaid | 14 hours ago
conorcleary | 13 hours ago
simondotau | 13 hours ago
threecheese | an hour ago
I've had to disable it on all my iDevices bc it breaks some Markdown parsers. How big a % of training data was produced on an Apple device? Ehhhhh probably small.
blixt | 14 hours ago
illiac786 | 14 hours ago
I’ll update Xcode, but I will definitely not install macOS 27.0
[OP] mikemcquaid | 14 hours ago
[OP] mikemcquaid | 9 hours ago
gwking | 11 hours ago
simonw | 14 hours ago
[OP] mikemcquaid | 14 hours ago
Were using Bubblewrap on Linux and moved to Landlock this release.
P.S. HUGE fan of your blog and writing Simon, keep up the great work. It’s the #1 resource I recommend to anyone in the industry wanting to learn more about LLMs (and pelicans).
monocularvision | 13 hours ago
12345hn6789 | 13 hours ago
Looks like this release breaks Intel Macs. Very very sad. Not even 5+ year old hardware is apparently supportable to some devs
throw0101a | 13 hours ago
Has anyone gone from MP to HB, or vice versa? Why did you switch from one to the other (and perhaps back again)? What did you find as the pros/cons of each?
ryandrake | 13 hours ago
MacPorts generally doesn't care what version of macOS you run, so here I am. I'll probably never go back to Homebrew. MP is great!
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49681546
vor_ | 3 hours ago
apothegm | 11 hours ago
Haven’t used MacPorts since. Has it gotten any better at those things?
teh64 | 5 hours ago
The second has also never happened to me. macports installs the packages into a separate prefix, and you just add that to the path, so I wonder how it could bork irretrievably.
Regarding instructions: for most packages, I found that just replacing `brew` with `sudo port` is enough, as most ports are available. And quite a few install instructions mention homebrew together with macports. I have not run into missing packages, but sometimes the ones that existed were a little out of date.
ihuman | 10 hours ago
isityettime | 9 hours ago
Homebrew's best differentiated strength imo is the whole Cask subsystem, which basically automates GUI app installs via "first-party" artifacts like .dmg and .pkg files. That's what I still sometimes use it for even though I have other package managers available, including MacPorts, that I prefer for most other things.
The ordering goes something like the following: Nix > pkgsrc > MacPorts > Homebrew > mas (CLI frontend for the App Store).
Each kinda has its niche. Nix is just generally preferable for me, and it covers all of my needs 99% of the time. It also happens to be pretty fast in terms of actual installation even if evaluating the Nix code can be slow for complex projects.
For proper development toolchains, it's all Nix all the time. Those are per-project rather than global, and what can't be managed by Nix isn't managed at all. Nix is this an overriding constraint there, which has never really been a problem for me.
Pkgsrc is good for development tools and terminal apps, but Nix is generally even better for those, so for me it's just an escape hatch in case something is broken or missing in Nixpkgs and I'm too lazy to fix it, or I genuinely want some library installed with its headers findable globally (rare, because that's mostly bad practice imo). Also good if I want a backup copy of an exotic shell or something in case I want to rm -rf /nix and not be forced back into Bash or zsh, which is nice when I'm working on my macOS bootstrap scripts. On macOS, everything you install via Pkgsrc will be a binary install, so it's relatively fast and its performance is relatively predictable.
MacPorts is broadly useful so it's useful for the same things as Pkgsrc, but it's also better at providing GUI Mac apps, built from source. For a while I got Emacs here when Emacs in Nixpkgs had a problem building with native compilation support, for example. Also good for my macOS bootstrap scripts since they're written in literate style in Org mode; it can be nice to have a working Emacs to dump them to disk with even without Nix if I'm iterating on them. MacPorts often ends up building stuff from source on my system, which can be slow, but I don't care because I have very little installed via MacPorts.
Homebrew historically didn't feel "safe" for me for development dependencies for various reasons. Before sandboxing support, running and installing and managing things as your own user felt especially unsafe from a security perspective. Now it's a lot better, but it still feels wrong to have global-ish prefixes owned by a particular user. The aggressive in-place upgrades also feel quite brittle for development dependencies, but to some extent that's true of anything that's not project-local. I also don't like that installing GUI apps with Homebrew can end up putting binaries related to their dependencies and not needed at runtime into my PATH— that feels way messier than what I get with Nix. It can also historically be very slow for what it does, but if you're using it in the recommended way, you don't often have to build from source so you can still expect a faster experience than with MacPorts even though both nominally support binary packages.
All that said, Homebrew shines when it comes to extremely broad support for arbitrary Mac apps, often including proprietary ones, and support for the arbitrary range of installation procedures that macOS app developers expect you to use. It's also very good in terms of freshness for macOS packages. Nix is competitive in that respect, but none of the others remotely are. The stuff I don't like about where Homebrew puts things and the filesystem permissions are also fixable if you use a custom prefix. That's officially unsupported and means you can't use "bottles" (i.e., you'll need to build packages that aren't "casks" from source), but it works fine and has been totally stable for many years. If you understand some basic Unix norms and how to compile software from source, you should feel comfortable doing it.
I also like to keep Homebrew's bin/ paths off my PATH, and selectively symlink or wrap binaries installed via Homebrew back to ~/.local/bin by hand. That way I can install whatever I want via Homebrew without worrying about it getting unexpectedly involved in my development processes or command-line environment.
Because Homebrew has historically been so slow for me, I've tried to install as little with it as possible, which means installing even some Mac GUI apps via Nix. That's kind of a pain because if you want Spotlight to pick them up, you need little trampoline wrapper apps because it won't register symlinks into the Nix store. And when Nixpkgs' selection is lacking, you can extend it with brew-nix, which uses Homebrew's JSON API to automatically generate Nix packages. They work, but some apps just can't do everything they're designed to from the Nix store due to macOS limitations/security policies, so you have to kind of figure out which you can install via Nix yourself. It's extra machinery, and so if Homebrew is faster enough now I may look forward to dropping it and just using Homebrew as my first choice for all GUI apps.
The App Store sucks, needless to say, not least of all because it requires an active login to a large tech company. I only use it for VPN apps or security software where Apple forces me to.
I don't recommend my setup to people for whom package managers aren't a first-class interest, but it is perfectly stable and it's unlikely to get you into trouble.
I think most people would be served well by combininations of two package managers, of one of two forms: Nix + an escape hatch or Homebrew + a development toolchain manager.
For people who like macOS' app installation procedures: Nix + pkgsrc
For people who like Nix but want a disciplined escape hatch: Nix + MacPorts
For people who like Nix and want absolute coverage: Nix + Homebrew
For people who don't really care about how their package manager works but are developers: Homebrew + mise or Homebrew + Nix
For non-developers who just want an automated/centralized way to install software aside from the App Store: Homebrew (and probably especially the GUI)
I think the main thing for me is just that no one should have free-floating, ambient development dependencies. You shouldn't have some software project that depends on what version of Python is on your PATH or what packages from PyPI are globally installed via pip or whatever. You shouldn't be manually building unoconv or pandoc or something against some LibreOffice headers that live in /usr/local or /opt/local or anywhere like that. Ideally, shouldn't be doing `make install` anywhere— if you need to compile something for your own use, compile it by writing a package (or having an LLM write it, you lazy bum). If you observe that kind of basic package management hygiene, "switching" is largely trivial and doesn't involve any manual cleanup or fixing.
And if you spend a few minutes thinking about a preference order that you like and configure your PATH accordingly, all of these package managers can coexist so that you can "switch" gradually, at your leisure.
kccqzy | 4 hours ago
pietz | 13 hours ago
x3n0ph3n3 | 10 hours ago
jitbit | 4 hours ago
jjice | 13 hours ago
I've always used it on my Mac work machines, but always used my native package managers on Linux. What are the reasons to run homebrew on Linux? Better newer package support when you're on something slower moving like a Debian distro?
I've standardized my config scripts on using language managers for those tools (go, cargo, uv), which isn't perfect, so maybe brew is worth a chance.
tkel | 13 hours ago
andriy_koval | 11 hours ago
exactly
tkel | 13 hours ago
[OP] mikemcquaid | 12 hours ago
I used to do these all by hand and they took me multiple hours. I still probably spent over an hour, including a bunch of time on a family holiday today. Comments like this make me wonder why I bother sometimes.
csande17 | 12 hours ago
> Status in 7.0.0: kernels without Landlock continue working without Linux sandboxing in the less secure pre-6.0.0 configuration; brew doctor reports missing protection as an advisory.
> No replacement opt-out; unavailable Landlock remains advisory.
With that being said, I can kind of see why "eliminate all traces of AI writing styles" wouldn't be a goal of the review/editing process. I've been out of the Apple ecosystem for a while, but I imagine Homebrew has enthusiastically adopted LLMs for a lot of tasks. If the public communications reflect that, then people who don't like LLMs can bounce immediately, rather than getting invested in the project and feeling betrayed later.
perardi | 11 hours ago
homebrew is a critical, important piece of software, and I appreciate the effort.
I certainly don’t appreciate the non-effort from reflexive LLM-haters. We get it. You don’t like LLMs. Try to have an opinion and a personality that doesn’t revolve around nitpicking AI writing.
elixirnogood | 9 hours ago
[OP] mikemcquaid | 9 hours ago
Homebrew has never been better performant, secure, tested, linted and typed. I understand the LLM dubiousness (I used to share it myself) but we’re the type of project where it’s very easy to get agents to do sensible end-to-end testing and review a nice language (Ruby). Just us on our outputs, not just our inputs.
One of our former maintainers was in high school when working on Homebrew. I’m sure many people would have found that worrying. His code was great, though (I reviewed most of it) and he made the project better. Same ultimately with LLMs. Your mileage may vary.
orangecat | 10 hours ago
azuanrb | 12 hours ago
https://mise.jdx.dev/bootstrap/packages/brew.html
bullfightonmars | 9 hours ago
mise has been an absolute delight.
1matin | 12 hours ago
khalic | 12 hours ago
mkrishnan | 12 hours ago
xvilka | 12 hours ago
[1] https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/wine-stable
mechanicum | 11 hours ago
You could create a third-party tap to install wine via homebrew.
MattDamonSpace | 11 hours ago
GUIs abound. Rejoice!
ricksunny | 10 hours ago
[OP] mikemcquaid | 9 hours ago
spdustin | 10 hours ago
Homebrew.app, however, has a show-stopper for me. "Failed to decode Homebrew JSON output" on the installed/upgrades panel. I'm guessing the Discover panel would normally indicate which Formulae/Casks are already installed, but because it couldn't parse the JSON output, that feature (if it exists) doesn't work.
I'll file an issue—I know HN isn't your bug tracker :)
Edit: there's an issue there already, and I sorted out the root cause: iTerm2's shell integration. If you're using zsh as your shell, the solution is here [^0] in the second comment.
[0]: https://github.com/Homebrew/BrewUI/issues/167/
mpweiher | 7 hours ago
yougotwill | 4 hours ago
denkmoon | 3 hours ago