Homebrew no longer allows bypassing Gatekeeper for unsigned/unnotarized software

For a quick background, Apple doesn't allow the typical quarantine bypass of Gatekeeper for ARM64 binaries. It must be digitally signed to run. And Intel based Macs are a dead end with macOS Tahoe being the last OS released for them. So, brew is disabling the --no-quarantine switch in their next major release or so.

From the post: "What alternatives to the feature have been considered?

None. Macs with Apple silicon are the platform that will be supported in the future, and Apple is making it harder to bypass Gatekeeper as is."

The writing was on the wall from the first implementation. But we all kept getting downvoted when pointing out the road ahead.

Yeah, I noticed the same on my Macbook. I mainly use it for theater stuff (Qlab) and remoting into my main Windows desktop environment. I just stopped doing some of the workflows on Mac and do them on Windows because I didn't feel like trying to figure out why macOS wouldn't let GIMP open an image I downloaded from the internet. So dumb.

"Locking this thread. Not interested in arguing the merits of this. It's already been communicated to third parties."

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.)

This has turned into a such a pain point for me I'm probably just going to ditch MacOS on my next hardware refresh and insist on a Linux-based workstation. I already use Linux for everything else, changing for $DAY_JOB is trivial.