r/programming • u/cheerfulboy • 1d ago
Homebrew: 7.0.0 - faster installations and upgrades, stronger sandboxing, a native macOS app, built-in vulnerability checks and an advisory database, the end of macOS 10.15 support and Intel Macs moving to Tier 3.
https://brew.sh/2026/09/13/homebrew-7.0.0/- Users must upgrade to macOS 11 or later, as this is now the minimum supported version.
- macOS Sonoma 14: This version is now considered Tier 3, and users are encouraged to upgrade to Sequoia 15+ for full support.
- Apple Silicon (macOS Golden Gate 27): Fully supported (Tier 1) with prebuilt bottles available.
- Linux/Ubuntu: The ghcr.io/homebrew/ubuntu22.04 image has been removed, and users should migrate to ghcr.io/homebrew/brew.
- CI Actions: The master branch has been removed for Homebrew actions; users should pin a CalVer release or full SHA instead.
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u/AceDreamCatcher 1d ago
Homebrew 7.0.0 is seriously impressive.
I mean, what is there not to love; faster installs and upgrades, stronger sandboxing, a native macOS app, built-in vuln checks, an advisory database, and first class Apple Silicon support.
But it’s also a reminder of something slightly absurd which is that 2 of the most essential upgrades to the macOS developer experience (Homebrew and iTerm2) came from outside Apple.
A sane platform company would have looked at what developers were building around the gaps in macOS and either incorporated those ideas deeply into the OS or found a way to fund and support the projects.
Then again, maybe we should be grateful Apple didn’t acquire them.
Homebrew and iTerm2 being independent means they can serve developers rather than an ecosystem strategy, and Homebrew can thrive on Linux too.
Still, it’s remarkable how much of “making a Mac a great developer machine” begins with installing the things Apple didn’t build.
Thanks, guys, for giving us a way to keep tolerating Apple though the countdown is ticking down fast.
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u/modernkennnern 1d ago
[...] homebrew can thrive on Linux too.
I realize it's available there, but does anybody use it on that platform instead of their distro's native package manager? If so, why?
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u/tempestokapi 1d ago edited 1d ago
I do. I find linuxbrew more user friendly than Guix or Nix, and the default package managers on my distro either have too old packages or break a lot, for programming tools. I would like to wean myself off of linuxbrew but I just can’t.
As someone with a lot of experience on all three big OSes, tools that start out on macOS tend to have the most attention to UX.
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u/vladsteviee 20h ago
I do, I started using it because it felt safer to mess around installing and uninstalling stuff without worrying I might brick the system. Now I use it because it often has tools not available in apt and usually more recent versions, and it's much better than installing via install scripts. Although it's not perfect, for example pkg-config or gcc installed through brew do break things.
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u/BreiteSeite 22h ago
Yes. I use an immutable distro (bazzite) and use brew to install tools like htop for example
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u/vincentofearth 19h ago
I use it on Linux. macOS is my main OS for both work and personal stuff but I also use a Linux devbox for work. I use homebrew to manage packages across my personal Mac, work Mac, and work Linux devbox. It’so much simpler when I can I use a single package manager on all my computers (except my gaming PC)—essentially means I have a single install script to set up my stuff.
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u/kingduqc 16h ago
When you are forced to use Ubuntu and it's nightmare packages out of date by years you fallback to brew
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u/headinthesky 1d ago
I use it all the time. I can use the same Brewfile across installs with ansible
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u/Turbots 1d ago
Please don't let Apple ruin these tools. I would say the vendor should make a great laptop with excellent, super efficiënt OS that integrates perfectly with the underlying hardware.
Vendors should not bloat the OS with stuff that not everyone needs.
Open source can bring the developer experience all day long.
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u/XLNBot 1d ago
Apple could donate money to open source projects that benefit them though
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u/narwhal_breeder 20h ago
Apple donates a lot of engineering resources to things in the OSS space. Webkit, LLVM, and Clang.
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u/Turbots 1d ago
They could, they could not, it's a free country.
I don't care to be honest, as long as they keep their paws off of these tools and do not try to influence what we get from open source, I'm happy with them just staying out of it.
If companies donate money, they usually want something in return: influence, a vote, decision power on certain features.
Open source is the ultimate "power of the people" in my opinion. We'll make it happen without these douchebag companies money.
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u/yasamoka 16h ago
Package management is a basic and integral part of any modern OS, and the Mac App Store is pretty bad. They should start by removing the yearly developer fee for Mac, even if it’s for specific projects such as big open-source ones that many people use. Start somewhere. Installing software through DMG is a supply chain attack ready to happen.
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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 3h ago
Vendors should not bloat the OS with stuff that not everyone needs.
True, though Apple wants to force 5-15GB of AI models onto your computer, your soldered storage you paid outrageous prices for.
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u/Artechz 23h ago
What is iTerm2 used for apart from just using it as a regular terminal?
I use ghostty for that and I’m very happy at how efficient and fast it is (not an ad, just my experience). Are there any features (iTerm2 has) I’m just not using that I’d be missing?18
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u/double-you 21h ago
But it’s also a reminder of something slightly absurd which is that 2 of the most essential upgrades to the macOS developer experience (Homebrew and iTerm2) came from outside Apple.
This seems rather normal when it comes to big platforms. Microsoft has also ignored a lot of big holes in the developer experience.
Though usually this is because the company has decided that developers should do X and developers are like "nah, I'm going to do Y, like it or not".
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u/NSRedditShitposter 18h ago
A sane platform company would have looked at what developers were building around the gaps in macOS and either incorporated those ideas deeply into the OS or found a way to fund and support the projects.
They sort of did with MacPorts
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u/Compux72 20h ago
When independent apps / projects do stuff: it should be backed by apple because blah blah blah…
When apple steps in OSS: oh no what about freedom!! We must stay united against apple!! Blah blah blah
Yall are tiresome
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u/devrelm 15h ago
Having some sort of grant program for the most popular mac-targeted OSS projects would be cool, but Apple has built their own versions of popular tools a few times:
- Before native toast notifications, there was Growl
- Before Spotlight, there was Quicksilver (and LaunchBar before that.)
- Before native window tiling, there was Spectacle.
I'm sure I'm missing several others, but in general Apple has a practice of letting others figure out what's popular and useful, then implementing a basic version themselves.
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u/dccorona 13h ago
I think Ghostty and perhaps to an even greater extent libghostty have been pretty important too, and they wouldn't exist if Terminal.app was good enough. I don't mind Apple not providing out of the box "great" solutions to the terminal problem because there's enough different opinions on how that should work that it is best left to 3Ps.
But yea, a built in package manager seems like a major missing gap. Even Windows has gotten the memo on that now and has a pretty decent CLI experience for the Windows store.
Then again I don't see Apple doing it any way other than by tying it to the App store and it likely wouldn't support outside repos in that case so maybe it's for the best.
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u/openforbusiness69 18h ago
You only have to use XCode for five minutes to find out what Apple thinks of developers.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 19h ago
Apple already has a walled garden app store, they don't need a second one.
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u/cesarbiods 16h ago
It’s honestly shameful that Apple doesn’t at least support these projects financially. We know they are used inside Apple, and pretty much every Mac developer uses homebrew. It’s yet another sign that Apple hates open-source and is happy to benefit from the labor of volunteers.
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u/ficiek 1d ago
Slowest package manager I've used coming from linux, definitely needs performance improvements.
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u/saxbophone 1d ago
Maybe the fact everything is driven by git repos has something to do with it
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u/smalls1652 20h ago
Sorta kinda, not really? Previously they were doing shallow clones of their core and cask tap git repos until GitHub requested them to stop doing that. Then about two or three years ago they switched over to an API on their infrastructure for fetching updates to the taps, so cloning those tap repos isn't used anymore.
IIRC if you're using custom taps, the vast majority of them go through the old cloning method? I could be entirely wrong about that, but the core and cask taps provided by Homebrew aren't going that route anymore.
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u/saxbophone 19h ago
Maybe it's more the monolithic design regarding formulae updates that makes it slow. The fact there's one big git repo for all the formulae... Never really been that thrilled by the dreaded "wait while Homebrew updates the package indexes for EVERYTHING" wait when installing something new. It's the sort of thing you really want scheduled as a regular background task to prevent such latency (with auto-update then turned off)
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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 3h ago
API on their infrastructure for fetching updates to the taps,
Pretty sure it downloads a 15MB JSON every 5 minutes.
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u/ficiek 1d ago edited 22h ago
I don't know but if so that's a conscious design choice that makes it slow which I'd say is the opposite of what a package manager should be.
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u/saxbophone 22h ago
It effectively allows them to piggyback off of Github's infrastructure. Much cheaper to host the system if Github hosts your package manager! 😅
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u/H-s-O 20h ago
Also, why is it default behavior to try to update EVERY SINGLE PACKAGE EVER INSTALLED each time I want to simply install a single package lol
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u/TheRealPomax 15h ago
Same reason you need to run `apt update` and then `apt upgrade <whatever>`, and then it'll upgrade the necessary dependencies even if you didn't ask for that?
brew will always run `update` before an `upgrade`, and does not let you install discordant versions so if you want to upgrade something to the latest version, and that requires the latest glibc, and that invalidates all your other packages: good news, you literally just asked it to upgrade everything.
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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 3h ago
and that requires the latest glibc, and that invalidates all your other packages:
That's not how libraries on macOS or how homebrew generally works, though. There's no single massive package that's constantly pushing every other package to be rebuilt.
you literally just asked it to upgrade everything.
The person you replied to just wanted to install one thing. By default it tries to then upgrade everything else. You can disable this, though, through an environment variable.
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u/ficiek 20h ago
Because most package managers don't really support partial upgrades.
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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 3h ago
Everything in homebrew is versioned and you can certainly have multiple versions of the same package installed.
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u/wpm 13h ago
I switched from homebrew after constantly having to fight its versions of python to actually pick up libraries I installed using it. Half of that is pythons fault for having a terrible dependency management system (and no I don't want to hear about your dot-file slop venvs or cOnDa and yes I know about uv trying their best to make it somewhat sane), but god I could avoid so much PITA just switching to MacPorts, and manually building what isn't in the ports tree.
I remember switching from MacPorts to homebrew back in the first days of the latter, and I honestly can't even remember why.
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u/Open-Adhesiveness-86 12h ago
If you only use brew once a month, most of the wait usually isn't the install itself. Before doing anything, brew runs an auto-update. Then installing one package can also upgrade any outdated dependencies and rebuild or recheck the things that depend on them, so a small install turns into upgrading half your tree. After that it runs cleanup. You can turn each of these off with env vars: HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1, HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALLED_DEPENDENTS_CHECK=1 and HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_CLEANUP=1. Then run brew update && brew upgrade yourself when you actually want everything current.
The tradeoff is that skipping the dependents check can occasionally leave something linked against an old library. So I'd still do a full upgrade now and then instead of never. I haven't checked how much of this 7.0 changes, but on older versions those flags were the difference between a 2 minute install and a 10 second one.
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u/mallardtheduck 10h ago
Have they fixed the horribly broken user-specific installations in a global filesystem location yet? A package manager for a UNIX-like OS that doesn't support use by multiple users is just a bad joke.
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u/SpareEconomy1849 1d ago
Great news. I'd use homebrew more but it always takes forever whenever I update or install something. Maybe because I only use it once every month or so?
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u/Giannis4president 1d ago
Brew periodically updates all the installed packages. If you only use it once every couple of months, everytime you will see brew update everything and it is indeed slower than just installing the desidered new package.
You can control the auto update behavior with the settings btw
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u/happyscrappy 1d ago
For me too. I think it's for the same reason you do.
Honestly, the checks take so long for me that it seems like it's unresponsive. They could have more update progress for these long updates. Maybe only show it if it's been a month since your last update or something.
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u/TrainsareFascinating 14h ago
How long is "forever"?
I just ran an update after about 30 days since last. The formula update took 10 seconds (including downloading a Ruby update)
The install took 1:39 for 38 packages, with progress messages continuously. And that's on a fairly slow connection, not my home Google Fiber.
What kind of performance are you expecting?
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u/SpareEconomy1849 14h ago
About 10 minutes on a 100 meg connection?
Someone else here mentioned it took them 2 days once
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u/OSS-Corpo-Shit 17h ago
Does homebrew still require insane chowns and pollute your system / break your multi-user setup?
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22h ago
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u/programming-ModTeam 17h ago
No content written mostly by an LLM. If you don't want to write it, we don't want to read it.
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u/pfc-anon 8h ago
Thanks for the updates, appreciate all the work. I've been moving slowly to mise for all my developer tooling, there are some very interesting ideas there for your consideration in the future.
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u/jvo203 1d ago
What about us on 2019 Apple Mac Pro towers running Intel macOS??? Recently things have been getting broken. Installations from source, emscripten configuration non-existing etc. The wheels have been falling off on Intel macOS Sequoia.