Posted by firexcy 9 hours ago
Just dropping this here for those who don't know about it. It solves most of my CLI dependencies.
Personally I use asdf to manage my software on Macs. It too has also changed its design recently to become user-hostile (the command-line tool no longer prints the options for the commands, and it's full of bugs since a recent major version change).
For anyone looking to make an alternative to Homebrew: check out asdf's plugin system! It is insanely easy for anyone to make an asdf plugin, install it, use it. It's just a directory of plaintext files/scripts somewhere on the web. I made a couple plugins for unpackaged apps within like 30 minutes of learning how plugins worked. Very "unix philosophy" (in a good way)
(aside: I'm not a "Mac person" (forced to use one by work), so I know this is an unpopular opinion, but Macs feel worse to use than either Windows or Linux. At least Windows has WSL2 if you like command-lines (or PowerShell if you're into that). OTOH Macs ship with insanely outdated incompatible tools, and the 3rd-party options are annoying as hell. Why do technical people keep using Macs?)
I agree though, Finder is a joke, the macOS system preferences has gotten incredibly cluttered and hard to use, the ever stricter code signing and download-opening restrictions are frustrating, and i can't even just install and run the docker CLI--docker on Mac requires Desktop and commercial use of Desktop requires a license.
All 3 systems have things about them that annoy me, but I'm with you that Mac is my least favorite. And it kinda sucks because the global text shortcuts (command-arrow, command-delete etc) are really handy and hard to replicate on other systems, and at least traditionally it's been a very pretty and well integrated desktop, the system itself just drives me up a wall.
That's not on Apple. Docker needs the Linux kernel (for Linux containers), so it's no different to needing something like Docker Desktop to use Docker on Windows. Yeah, Docker changed the license on Docker Desktop, but there's plenty of alternatives (Podman Desktop, Rancher Desktop, Colima, Apple's own container tool, or just running a Linux VM in Lima).
It's a licensing issue; Apple has never shipped GPLv3 software. This has been discussed dozens of times on HN.
Of course you can use Homebrew to install a GNU toolchain to your heart's content.
Well!
Note: I think one problem of homebrew is called ... Apple. That is, they depend on whatever Apple decides.
Granted, this is similar to Microsoft; and to some extent to Linux, though people can make more modifications on Linux normally.
I am a Linux users so this does not affect me, and I also wrote my own "package" manager (basically just some ruby scripts to compile things from source), but at the same time I also think that at the end of the day, the user should decide what he or she wants. This is also why my scripts support systemd - I don't use/need systemd myself, but my tools should be agnostic, so I don't project my own opinion onto them.
There is of course a limitation, which is available time - often I just lack time to support xyz. But I keep that spirit alive - software should serve the human, not the other way around. (I have no substantial opinion on the feature itself here, that is to me it seems ok to remove it; the larger question is who dictates something onto users and what workarounds exist. Do workarounds exist? From reading the issue tracker, it seems the homebrew maintainers say that there are no workarounds, and thus it should be removed. If that is true then they have a point, but people also downvoted that, so perhaps there are workarounds - in which case these should be supported. I really don't know myself - to me apple is more like a glorified Windows, so basically the same. All software should be liberated eventually.)
Homebrew is removing --no-quarantine because:
Apple is killing Intel support.
Apple Silicon won’t run unsigned apps anyway.
Homebrew will soon require all apps to pass Gatekeeper.
They don’t want to help users bypass macOS security.
This is basically a security + future-compatibility cleanup.
Technically true, but misleading. The macOS kernel won't execute an Apple Silicon binary that doesn't have a signature, but as Apple documents, an ad-hoc signature is enough to meet that requirement. That won't get you past Gatekeeper, but that's no different to how it is with unsigned Intel binaries.
1. Play cat and mouse with Apple to ensure `--no-quarantine` works
2. Deprecate and remove the feature.
>I can't help but think, "Don't obey in advance."
They aren't obeying in advance. They simply aren't doing the work to find another Gatekeeper bypass for ARM64.