macOS 11 Big Sur compatibility on Apple Silicon

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857

by OJFord • 6 years ago

189 145 6 years ago

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

Tbh it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this, and would ensure that it happened sooner.

I mean, Apple work closely with Adobe and other software companies to ensure a good experience for the end users. At least I think they do.

And there are quite a lot of people using and depending on Homebrew.

Take myself for example, an Apple customer. I use an iPhone and a MacBook Air. But many of the tools available through Homebrew are so essential to me that without Homebrew I likely would have stuck with Linux and FreeBSD for my laptop too like I used to instead of using a MacBook Air at all.

And it’s not just one laptop either. In the future when I can afford to I am going to buy more Apple computers.

dblooman• 6 years ago

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

ognarb• 6 years ago

Max Howell should have continued to hack on KDE instead of creating homebrew ;)

saagarjha13• 6 years ago

Apple recently donated Apple silicon Macs to Homebrew for CI.

alwillis7• 6 years ago

That was a long time ago; basically ancient history now.

monkin2• 6 years ago

Tbh it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this, and would ensure that it happened sooner.

They could donate something, but why should they? It’s community project not run by Apple. We, users, who actively use it to make professional work, should be responsible for supporting community projects like that. :)

Smaug1232• 6 years ago

I kind of disagree. For the same reason that shops provide free parking, it would make sense for Apple to put effort into the de-facto package manager for macOS.

tannhaeuser• 6 years ago

AFAIK, Apple does or did sponsor MacPorts and uses or used it internally; but maybe I'm wrong.

Apple should have a vested interest in developers on their platform and thus ports of popular F/OSS; but obviously, developers, graphic artists, music and other content producers aren't as significant a customer group relative to consumers as they used to be. I wonder how the decline of the Mac platform for professional work hits Apple's baseline assuming the historical draw of content creators to the platform also brought consumers and has been used by Apple in advertising, but I guess Apple knows better and simply makes so much more money with iDevices.

pwinnski3• 6 years ago

Apparently they did donate things, according to the brew team on this very post.

ghayes• 6 years ago

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

saurik2• 6 years ago

Yeah... as much as I tend to dislike Apple and their decisions, this is a complaint I don't really understand... especially since the M1 with Rosetta 2 supposedly runs software better than the Intel macs did anyway! I actually chalk this up to the weird fetish people who use Apple products tend to have with things being exactly "modern" as opposed to being stable and functional or even performant (which tends to lead them to pester people to upgrade to new things on the Apple treadmill constantly rather than support new features or use cases... Windows and Android users don't do this and I frankly think are much better off--both professionally and psychologically--because of it). Put elsewise: Apple did do the work of porting homebrew... by writing Rosetta 2, and they probably tested it on Homebrew internally to make sure it was compatible with lots of Homebrew packages.

JKCalhoun• 6 years ago

Yes, I just did last night (to install youTube-dl in fact).

You do have to specify Terminal to launch using Rosetta however.

rewtraw• 6 years ago

Yes. And it has worked perfectly for me so far, as if I was still using brew on an Intel mac. People complaining that they can't do development on an M1 mac because of the lack of homebrew support either don't realize you can simply run it under Rosetta, or are just complaining for the sake of it.

thejosh• 6 years ago

Given Apples track record regarding everything else, is this surprising?

They are against right to repair, want to have their own walled garden for both mobile and desktop, so why would they help with this?

throwaway9894722• 6 years ago

Because they use it internally.

madeofpalk• 6 years ago

Homebrew makes Macs more attractive for more people, with little "loss of control" from Apple. I'm sure Apple (people) themselves use Homebrew internal.

gigatexal• 6 years ago

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

blinkingled4• 6 years ago

Apple doesn't really have any interest in making it easier for people to use Macs for anything that doesn't benefit their closed ecosystem - they are still ok with you using it for open source or enterprise work so long as they don't have to do anything special. That part of their stance has been very consistent.

People have been consistently rewarding them for this direction by buying more of their stuff and relying on open source projects to fill in the gaps without really acknowledging the obvious problem that Apple has made it increasingly unattractive to use their hardware to do anything other than Apple stuff.

To me it matters most that I be able to do things that I want easily on the platform I choose - in that sense PC hardware with Linux is the best choice I have, with Windows coming in 2nd due to how much Microsoft has done to make their OS attractive for wide variety of use cases that are not necessarily to Microsoft's direct benefit.

saagarjha13• 6 years ago

Apple uses Homebrew internally; it is in their best interest to keep it working on Apple silicon.

throwaway9894722• 6 years ago

Apple make extensive use of homebrew internally, so this is clearly bullshit.

nojito• 6 years ago

This isn't true. Apple donated Macs to Homebrew.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25188225

throw0101a• 6 years ago

Apple doesn't really have any interest in making it easier for people to use Macs for anything that doesn't benefit their closed ecosystem - they are still ok with you using it for open source or enterprise work so long as they don't have to do anything special. That part of their stance has been very consistent.

Besides being used internally as mentioned, making the Alpha Geeks (to use Tim O'Reilly's phrase) happy would be prudent for their continued success. If the Alpha Geeks aren't using your product, they will not recommended it to their friends when asked for computer advise, and it will not be installed in relatives' home where the Alpha Geeks tend to do tech support.

The Alpha Geeks was how Apple probably got more popular that PCs in the first place, and they may now have a lot/enough inertial to keep moving forward, but Microsoft and PCs used to be the 800-pound (400 kg) gorilla, and they're less so now.

There's a lot of Unix-y stuff being used in academy, research, and HPC: plenty of folks there would be just as willing to switch to a PC with Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS (which run the world's HPC clusters) if macOS gets in the way of their workflow if Homebrew or Macports don't work.

user-the-name2• 6 years ago

You know Boot Camp exists, right? That is a huge amount of work, done specifically by Apple themselves, in order to support running completely different OSes on their hardware.

coliveira2• 6 years ago

I consider that developing software for the Apple platform is a free job to benefit Apple. It rarely pays, and you need to be always on the look for ways Apple is breaking the platform on their frequent releases. I personally wouldn't do that unless I had a very clear motivation.

marsokod• 6 years ago

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

saagarjha13• 6 years ago

Apple has launched a public release for macOS running on Apple silicon–it's what the new M1-based Macs are running.

hbbio• 6 years ago

Oh yes!

I am holding off purchasing multiple ARM Macs until homebrew works properly. We need them for our development and ops work, and now these uber-cool Macs are out, buying old Intel ones has become a no-no too, so we don't buy any desktops/laptops at all!

If you read this and work at Apple, you can show this message to your bosses and I hope that it could entice the company to sponsor Homebrew with hardware + engineer time to help the project go forward. I am pretty sure than homebrew generates 100s of millions of sales for Macs (100k computers sold instead of Linux laptops if homebrew did not exist seems reasonable).

saagarjha13• 6 years ago

Hundreds of millions of Macs is the right order of magnitude to measure total sales–most Mac users are not developers using Homebrew. And the relevant people are almost certainly already aware of the existence of Homebrew.

user-the-name2• 6 years ago

It does work, though. It just runs through Rosetta like everything else that hasn't been updated yet.

alwillis7• 6 years ago

As you can read further down the thread, the Homebrew team was granted test units during the summer and had M1 Macs donated to them once they shipped.

sfifs• 6 years ago

But many of the tools available through Homebrew are so essential to me that without Homebrew I likely would have stuck with Linux and FreeBSD for my laptop

Apple is sending you a message on your value to them as a customer by the fact that they didn't bother :-)

Have you tried WSL2 lately? You can get way more powerful systems with a Linux environment and soon to arrive GPU pass through.

an_opabinia• 6 years ago

My experience with WSL2 is that it’s a bajillion little broken stuffs here and there. If you are not doing the same exact kind of web development that everyone else is, it’s not a smooth experience.

Anyway it’s not about value if customers or anything, they’re just jackasses. Apple could afford to fix 10,000 different concerns simultaneously, and many companies do achieve that level of support, at least proportionate to the resources others have. There isn’t some strategy here.

tambourine_man2• 6 years ago

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

Toutouxc• 6 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Windows didn't have one until a few months ago..? Also, the Mac App Store has been around for 10 years, Homebrew for 11 years and MacPorts for 18 years, so it's not like there was an urgent need to build one.

avianlyric• 6 years ago

I don’t understand why people are expecting day one support for applications like Homebrew.

By its very nature Homebrew is going to hit every edge case that can possibly exist during this transition process. It also has a huge number of indirect dependancies, also driven by its nature as a package manager. Meaning a huge amount of work across many projects is needed to get Homebrew “working” for everyone.

We’re at the start of Apples two year transition to ARM CPUs. If important thing X doesn’t work right, and it’s important to your workflow, then buy an Intel Mac.

Otherwise have patience and wait for people work through the issues. Besides in a years time Apple are undoubtedly going to release the M2, M3 etc with a whole slew of “pro” devices better suited for developers.

As to why Adobe gets a helping hand. Simple, Adobe’s customers almost certainly make up a bigger portion of Apple’s revenue than developers. Plus normal people understand what photoshop is, and understand how important it is to work on these new Mac. The general public hasn’t even heard of Homebrew, never mind understands how impressive it would be to get such software working on day 0.

chrisseaton3• 6 years ago

I don’t understand why people are expecting day one support for applications like Homebrew.

I'm not paying the Homebrew developers anything so I've got no right to expect anything or criticise whatever they choose to do with their time and their project.

But if they did want compatibility it's not true that they're 'at the start of Apples two year transition to ARM CPUs' - you have been able to access development machines for many months. I got one and I don't maintain anything nearly as important as Homebrew.

The reason Apple do developer previews, betas, and early access to hardware is so that you can have day-one support, if you want it.

cle• 6 years ago

I don’t understand why people are expecting day one support for applications like Homebrew.

Because an important segment of Apple's customers--developers--rely on Homebrew for critical functionality.

Of course it's difficult to move an entire ecosystem to a new architecture, and Apple may have made the right move here. But it's not very hard to understand why people who stand to gain so much from the new architecture, but can't use it yet because the ecosystem isn't there yet, are a little annoyed.

lukifer• 6 years ago

Adobe’s customers almost certainly make up a bigger portion of Apple’s revenue than developers

Do we have any actual numbers on that? I feel like developers (and power-users generally) have internalized this notion that we're a rounding error compared to the general public (perhaps a holdover from the old days, when regular folks didn't use the internet or computers at all). But in 2020, software development is a massive portion of the economy, and Macs seem to be disproportionately popular with startups and developers.

A little lazy googling puts the graphic design industry at $12.7 billion, and the software development industry at $388.98 billion.

vmchale3• 6 years ago

The general public hasn’t even heard of Homebrew, never mind understands how impressive it would be to get such software working on day 0.

Sure, but making it easy for developers to use your platform is good because then it's easier to develop big fancy things like Photoshop.

chaosharmonic• 6 years ago

We’re at the start of Apples two year transition to ARM CPUs. If important thing X doesn’t work right, and it’s important to your workflow, then buy an Intel Mac.
Otherwise have patience and wait for people work through the issues. Besides in a years time Apple are undoubtedly going to release the M2, M3 etc with a whole slew of “pro” devices better suited for developers.

There's also, arguably, a pretty pronounced bleeding-edge trend over the past 12-18 months or so, across a number of device categories: foldables everywhere, new game consoles, multiple open-spec Linux phones, M1 Macs, etc.

And if you're not itching to early adopt, the timing for all of these is actually kind of great. Because parallel to this, there are multiple ecosystem-level changes hitting over the next several months that should translate to big usability jumps for any of the ones that get a next version. (Though probably not the consoles, since those tend to run longer lifecycles by design.)

Of particular note: by the time the M2 or M3 has ironed out the macOS ARM ecosystem, you can also reasonably expect high-end devices as a category to have 6GHz WiFi and a modern spec for Bluetooth audio.

novok2• 6 years ago

If I were apple I would of shipped a dozen developer transition mac minis to them free of charge at least a few months ago, as part of developer relations, to kickstart the process if they haven't done something similar.

s_dev• 6 years ago

And there are quite a lot of people using and depending on Homebrew.

People are under no obligation to upgrade immediately to big sur. I'm holding out on Catalina for a few months with older hardware. M1 is a big change and I'm not surprised it will initially break a few things.

Also the point of having third party app ecosystem is that the first party doesn't have to maintain them and yet still receive some benefit from them.

rsynnott2• 6 years ago

I mean, Apple work closely with Adobe and other software companies to ensure a good experience for the end users. At least I think they do.

If they are, they're not doing a very good job; Adobe stuff is reportedly kind of buggy even under Rosetta, and historically Adobe has been very, very slow with the x86_64 transition, the Intel transition, the MacOS 10 transition, and so on.

e402• 6 years ago

Apple's support of my software company was terrible and shameful.

I got a dev unit (mac mini). It had beta 2 on it. We started the porting effort and had questions. Forums were the only place they said answers could be had. Never got any answers.

When beta 10 was released, it just wouldn't install. We tried for a week then saw a post on the forums that gave a hint about Mac-to-Mac reset of the firmware and general machine state. We had to upgrade another machine to Catalina to use it (inconvenient, but not a killer).

When 11.0.1 came out it wouldn't install and now the machine is a brick. We ordered a production mini with the M1 and it will be here in late December. While we sit with the brick and can't do any porting.

At every step we hit brick walls and had zero help from Apple. It was beyond frustrating.

treesknees• 6 years ago

For what it's worth, you could have walked into an Apple store and bought the M1 Mini the same day. No need to wait 3 weeks.

m463• 6 years ago

it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this

Apple has lost its way.

They should not only be helping with this, but SHIPPING more stuff like this themselves.

And "pro" has lost its meaning. It is now for "youtubers who want nice stuff" and don't mind someone else controlling their experience, as opposed to engineers and scientists and creative people who are actually creating the future.

vmchale3• 6 years ago

Tbh it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this, and would ensure that it happened sooner.

It's unfortunate they don't have a package manager. They could do better than apt if they put resources behind it.

robertoandred• 6 years ago

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

mlindner• 6 years ago

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

Mandatum• 6 years ago

Even the Developer Transition Kit / Universal App Quickstart Program has been handled poorly. Bunch of teething and hardware failure/DOA issues and arbitrary limitations with near zero engagement from Apple.

Nothing like the original Intel transition program, I'm willing to bet they're going to give credit instead of hardware for the exchange this time around too. It's an entirely different company now.

Apple doesn't NEED to subsidize or keep developers happy anymore. They've already won us and the marketshare. SE, vertical integration, leapfrog CPU and battery life.. They don't have any competitor, so why waste money investing in the ecosystem? We're going to build for them anyway.

rbrtl• 6 years ago

Sure. They just developed a new chip, with a new 5nm process, at to drop all the devs off a cliff and hang them out to dry. That will sell units. If they don't work the issues out they'll have to partially shelve the design and go grovelling back to Intel for CPUs because things will continue not to work until it affects the profits. I would be incredibly surprised to see "near zero engagement" with major vendors on this, have (e.g. Adobe) devs written about big issues, or just FOSS wranglers who feel their Free project is undervalued?

I agree there's been a big shift in focus. I'm seriously unhappy about the Amazon/Google level of ad-down-throat-ramming I have to put up with on my Apple TV. But I don't think they're throwing the towel in on hardware and software innovation.

arvinsim4• 6 years ago

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

dhbanes• 6 years ago

Does anyone know the current status of MacPorts on M1 Macs?

saagarjha13• 6 years ago

MacPorts itself mostly works. Many of the basic packages that are already cross-platform build fine. Some of the more complex languages and runtimes have issues building, or fail at runtime.

sjwright• 6 years ago

The HN title needs the word "Homebrew" added for context.

saagarjha13• 6 years ago

I assume the reasoning is that the link mentions Homebrew.

ChildOfChaos• 6 years ago

Yeah, misleading title. Article seems to suggest something bigger and then it's just some niche crap nobody cares about, pure clickbait.

OJFord• 6 years ago

Sorry, I did consider it, but knowing that HN now populates the first /<name> as well as the domain for some known sites where it's meaningful, such as GitHub, I opted for the issue's title alone.

Corrado2• 6 years ago

@dang, can we get this fixed? I too, was confused about this post until I read the article.

floatingatoll• 6 years ago

That @highlight doesn't have any effect, unless he's already reading the thread for other reasons and sees it with his eyes (apparently not yet :). Emailing them using the Contact link in the footer to have a title corrected works well (and more rapidly) though.

haunter• 6 years ago

Submit PRs to fix things. Almost every issue we have had so far has been already known. We know things aren't working. We need help fixing things not telling us what isn't working.

wombatmobile• 6 years ago

I assumed vmware would not be compatible with M1, but they've announced support is coming.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/11/parallels-confirm...

cdubzzz• 6 years ago

Off topic aside — I have never seen such complex GitHub issue templating[0]. It’s neat.

What made me look at was the fact that this FR ticket has the line:

How the feature would be relevant to at least 90% of Homebrew users

That seems pretty aggressive but I imagine they do get loads of feature requests.

[0] https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/new/choose

samgranieri• 6 years ago

I've been following this daily since the issue was created. It's quite fascinating watching the progress on this. Once everything works, I will get a new laptop

cdelsolar• 6 years ago

Sorry if this is a little bit off-topic but I can't find this answer anywhere. Can I run Docker on M1 right now? Even through Rosetta 2? Or does it not work that way? I want to buy an M1 laptop but need to be able to run some simple images on it.

seek3r• 6 years ago

You can’t run Docker for Mac. You need to use Docker Machine and connect to a Raspberry Pi or some other hardware that is able to run Docker.

robpco• 6 years ago

Unfortunately you cannot run Docker on the M1 yet, even with Rosetta 2. There are some hacky workarounds for manually launching single images, but I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for.

Docker is working on it, and the latest blog I’ve seen is here: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/29/early-docker-buil...

ogre_codes• 6 years ago

FWIW: Docker will not run x86 VMs. I only mention this because you brought up running Docker via Rosetta.

dwaite• 6 years ago

There is no packaged way to run docker on m1 yet. Once Docker is supported, it will be running ARM native - so you will likely use QEMU to emulate other architectures like x86 and x86_64 if you don't have ARM-based containers available.

alwillis7• 6 years ago

Can I run Docker on M1 right now?

Soon but not yet: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/29/early-docker-buil...

tuananh2• 6 years ago

a little off topic but i really dislike the design of Homebrew around using git as update mechanism.

brew update is taking way too slow every time i need to install something now.

bartvk• 6 years ago

Yeah I wonder if there’s a good way to keep it updated. I found an older blog post that puts their updating in .zshrc but I feel there must be better ways.

http://craigstjean.com/2016/02/Keeping-Homebrew-Up-to-Date-W...

hchz• 6 years ago

i would cron this before i blocked loading the prompt with such a slow check.

tuananh2• 6 years ago

but i don't want to update all the packages to latest always though.

sj660• 6 years ago

Why does Brew have all of those dependencies? fwiw, it works fine right now if you install two versions, one for rosetta and one for apple silicon and let the latter compile things from source.

bhahn• 6 years ago

Should the title be updated to include “Homebrew”? As is, it lacks any context and requires looking at the link to know.

js2• 6 years ago

I was curious about the gcc blocker. It mostly seems to be due to formulae that depend on GNU Fortran. However, there's a Fortran front-end for LLVM:

https://github.com/flang-compiler/flang/wiki

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/master/flang/

I wonder if it's an alternative to waiting on gcc gaining arm64 support. Frankly, I don't see why any of homebrew should have to depend on gcc.

macOS 11 Big Sur compatibility on Apple Silicon

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