[ryandrake]

What would be great is a Homebrew-compatible system that doesn't cut off support for older machines. I have a 3.8 GHz Quad core i5 iMac that still crushes, yet Homebrew has determined that I'm just too old and icky[1] to work with anymore. I had to move over to MacPorts, which is surprisingly nice, but I still miss brew.

Yea, I know. It's open source. They can do what they want. Still sucks.

1: https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers

[happyopossum]

To be fair, Apple stopped providing security fixes for Mojave ~4+ years ago, and there have been 7 or 8 new os releases since then…

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect an open source project to support everything

[rbanffy]

I think MacPorts still supports PowerPC Macs. I would need to rebuild my G5 to verify it because the hard disk is long dead, but last time I checked, it worked.

I get it - it’s a different beast with very different ideas behind it, but MacPorts is BSD-solid, and that’s a lot.

[halostatue]

There's support and "support".

MacPorts has some level of support for PowerPC, but anything that isn't in the most recent ~3-4 releases is likely to be cut off from any number of packages at useful versions. (There's substantial work down to support Rust on much older versions of macOS, but there's also versions above which Rust has cut off older macOS versions.)

I believe that there's a recommended stream for when you need older versions support, but it's definitely a secondary target from what I've been reading on the MLs.

[gabagool]

I agree in principle but Homebrew only supports the latest 3 versions of macOS. Right now Ventura 13 which came out in October 2022 is unsupported.

[dewey]

I still think that's entirely fair for a power user tool like homebrew. With the upgrade rates of macOS that probably means that's 98% of the users would be covered. Expecting an open source project to accept bug requests from a bigger variety of versions that then would need test devices on these versions to replicate issues sounds unrealistic. Bigger companies, or Apple itself I would hold to much higher standards when it comes to that.

[bsagdiyev]

> power user tool like homebrew.

That makes no sense then. A power user may still want to run older OS versions for a reason. Take the training wheels off it and then it'll be a power user tool.

[dewey]

> A power user may still want to run older OS versions for a reason.

No doubt there are edge cases like that, but I don't fault a project for not catering to the < 1% of users who would fall into that bucket and would probably be the ones that cause trickier support cases. These would maybe also be the user that could just install it without homebrew then, it's not like homebrew is the only way to install software.

[edschofield]

This is not an edge case. Most HN commenters describe the latest two versions of macOS as being objectively worse than earlier versions: slower, less stable, more broken. There are significant numbers of “power users” who deliberately avoid upgrading or have actively downgraded macOS to Sonoma because they care about their computing experience.

[ksherlock]

brew used to say, more or less, "This OS is old and unsupported. Don't submit bug reports. If you have problems, too bad. If you submit a PR to fix something, we might merge it". Fair enough, right? Now it just says, "Go fuck yourself, grandpa."

[skybrian]

True, but I think you still want to avoid Homebrew if you're interested in older Mac versions. A specific project might have some support for the version you're interested in. For example, the Go 1.23 toolchain (which isn't the latest version) supports Mac releases back to Big Sur.

[yabutlivnWoods]

Run Linux on it. Apple has cut that OS off anyway. Would be safer security wise to have an OS that's updated

[password4321]

Yes MacPorts is the way. I switched after a new MacOS release meant mine was too old - brew update uninstalled a bunch of stuff I had been using then it stopped and let me know.

There's also https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher for the adventurous.

[maxkfranz]

You could use the OpenCode legacy patcher to upgrade to v15/Sequoia: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

[ryandrake]

Sure, but this might win you a couple of years max. Homebrew's "Support Tiers" page, which I linked, also addresses OCLP users, going so far as to specify a minimum Intel architecture. So, even if you use OCLP to allow support for newer OS versions, eventually your CPU architecture will be too old and you're back in Tier 3.

Also, the writing is on the wall: Ultimately, Homebrew will be ARM-only, once Apple's legacy support becomes ARM-only. At which point it's game-over for Intel Macs.

Homebrew solves the "availability of software" problem in the Mac ecosystem, but it does not solve the "Need to stay on the new hardware treadmill" problem.

[tekronis]

What did you find surprising about MacPorts? And if you had any gripes to share, what would they be?