Providing details of the biggest changes that Homebrew users have been excited about in the last year: support for Big Sur and the ongoing work for ARM. Provide technical details on what's required for us to support a new operating system from Apple and what the entire Homebrew ecosystem needs to do/change in order to support a new architecture. MacOS 11.0 (Big Sur) has been released to the public, and our goal is for Homebrew to support it. How the feature would be relevant to at least 90% of Homebrew users In the long run, more than 90% of Homebrew (macOS) users are going to run Apple Silicon hardware. Homebrew is a popular package manager for Mac that easily allows users to install and manage command line tools, apps, and utilities, typically familiar with the Linux and Unix world. Because it’s a package manager, you won’t need to manually build anything from source either. A description of what changes Homebrew needed to make to get working on macOS 11 Big Sur and what work we've done and are doing to support a new CPU architec.
Today I’d like to announce Homebrew 2.6.0. The most significant changes since 2.5.0 are macOS Big Sur support on Intel, brew commands replacing all brew cask commands, the beginnings of macOS M1/Apple Silicon/ARM support and API deprecations.
Major changes and deprecations since 2.5.0:
- macOS Homebrew running natively on M1/Apple Silicon/ARM has partial functionality. We recommend installing into
/opt/homebrewand forbid installing into/usr/local(to avoid clashing with the macOS Intel install and allow their usage side-by-side). We currently recommend running Homebrew using Intel emulation with Rosetta 2. brew tap-newwill set up GitHub Actions workflows toupload to GitHub Releases. Read the blog post for more documentation.
Other changes since 2.5.0 I’d like to highlight are the following:
Finally:
Homebrew Big Sur
- Discourse and IRC are now deprecated as official communication methods in favour of GitHub Discussions.
- Homebrew accepts donations through GitHub Sponsors and still accepts donations through Patreon. If you can afford it, please consider donating. If you’d rather not use GitHub Sponsors or Patreon (our preferred donation methods), check out the other ways to donate in our README.
Homebrew Big Sur Ranch
Thanks to all our hard-working maintainers, contributors, sponsors and supporters for getting us this far. Enjoy using Homebrew!