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0 pointshappyopossum1d ago0 comments

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

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rbanffy1d ago

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.

halostatue21h ago

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.

gabagool1d ago

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.

dewey1d ago

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.

bsagdiyev1d ago

> 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.

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ksherlock1d ago

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."

skybrian1d ago

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.

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