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macOS 11 Big Sur compatibility on Apple Silicon

189 points| OJFord | 5 years ago |github.com | reply

145 comments

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[+] codetrotter|5 years ago|reply
> (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.

[+] avianlyric|5 years ago|reply
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.

[+] e40|5 years ago|reply
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.

[+] blinkingled|5 years ago|reply
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.

[+] ghayes|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] hbbio|5 years ago|reply
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).

[+] dblooman|5 years ago|reply
I think at one point homebrew had to crowdfund buying Mac minis, so not surprised
[+] Mandatum|5 years ago|reply
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.

[+] s_dev|5 years ago|reply
>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.

[+] mlindner|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] vmchale|5 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] monkin|5 years ago|reply
> 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. :)

[+] arvinsim|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] gigatexal|5 years ago|reply
Yeah imagine if Apple did sponsor them how much more they could do.
[+] tambourine_man|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] rsynnott|5 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] marsokod|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] thejosh|5 years ago|reply
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?

[+] m463|5 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] sfifs|5 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] bhahn|5 years ago|reply
Should the title be updated to include “Homebrew”? As is, it lacks any context and requires looking at the link to know.
[+] haunter|5 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] cdubzzz|5 years ago|reply
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

[+] sjwright|5 years ago|reply
The HN title needs the word "Homebrew" added for context.
[+] OJFord|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] saagarjha|5 years ago|reply
I assume the reasoning is that the link mentions Homebrew.
[+] Corrado|5 years ago|reply
@dang, can we get this fixed? I too, was confused about this post until I read the article.
[+] ChildOfChaos|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, misleading title. Article seems to suggest something bigger and then it's just some niche crap nobody cares about, pure clickbait.
[+] cdelsolar|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
FWIW: Docker will not run x86 VMs. I only mention this because you brought up running Docker via Rosetta.
[+] dwaite|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] dhbanes|5 years ago|reply
Does anyone know the current status of MacPorts on M1 Macs?
[+] saagarjha|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] samgranieri|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] tuananh|5 years ago|reply
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.

[+] sj660|5 years ago|reply
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.