[philistine]

The deprecation of Intel support is agressive! Every Mac enthusiast I know who uses a Mac as a server uses their old machines, which are pretty much all Intel. We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple!

I know supporting Intel is an ordeal and a choice, but I'm firmly on the camp that Homebrew should find a way to maintain Intel support as long as possible.

[stouset]

If anything, the overwhelming majority of Apple enthusiasts have gone all-in on Apple Silicon. I sincerely doubt those using old Macs as servers are anything but a rounding error.

[asdff]

Maybe among the general mac population they are a rounding error. But among the mac population who actually peeks behind the curtain and uses homebrew?

[jrmg]

Maybe I’m just biased because it’s what I’ve done personally, but almost everyone using an old Intel Mac as a server is surely running Linux?

[inopinatus]

I’m still using a 2017 iMac Pro as a desktop sidecar for almost anything that doesn’t require a current-generation CPU/GPU or colossal memory bandwidth. The speakers are great, so is the 5k Retina display.

[asdff]

If your clients are all macs it is just nicer keeping the server on macos imo. mac os is unix after all so you don't have any software incompatibilities for tools you'd probably run on the server. Time machine support on the server is built in, instead of being a sort of hack with samba if you wanted to try and run it on a linux server. I haven't messed with it much but there might be some clever stuff you could do with applescript and triggered actions, maybe schedule your compute jobs from your calendar app for example.

[brigandish]

Which Linux are you using for that?

[stouset]

Yes, to such a stunning degree that I’m having a hard time believing you’re serious. The M1 was utterly transformative. The install base of homebrew is enormous. The proportion who are keeping old Mac hardware around as home servers is minuscule. The proportion of those who are keeping old Intel Macs are a fraction of that, and the ones who aren’t just running Linux on them are yet another fraction.

That’s not to say you’re crazy or anything. You do you. But do understand that you almost certainly constitute a nearly irrelevant minority of users of homebrew.

[saghm]

> We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple!

If only Apple put a fraction of its resources towards maintaining something like homebrew (or paying the people who do), maybe the situation would be different.

[mrpippy]

At this point that would be a 2018 Mac mini, which can only run Sequoia (which will be out-of-support at the same time as Homebrew drops Intel support).

If you want Intel support, MacPorts still runs back to Leopard.

[philistine]

My server is an old mac we've upgraded. My home server is an iMac.

[JSR_FDED]

Does brew gather statistics that could show what portion of users is on Intel vs Apple Silicon?

[sunaookami]

Yeah they also removed support for --no-quarantine flag :/ I only use it for a few casks nowadays and try to avoid Homebrew as much as possible. For CLI stuff I use Nix, Home-Manager and Nix-Darwin.

[JamesSwift]

Well nix and devenv are also dropping intel mac support due to apple cutting off support : (

[srik]

A saving grace is they're perfect for linux distros.