[Development] Remove OSX 10.6 Build?

Alexis Menard menard at kde.org
Thu Jan 23 21:46:59 CET 2014


On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 5:16 PM, Jan Farø <jan.faroe at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On 23/01/2014, at 23.59, development-request at qt-project.org wrote:
>
>
> If you do the math from the data available here
> http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0
> (that’s December 2013), 10.6 accounts for slightly less than 20% of all
> the OS X versions. Let’s suppose those numbers reflect the reality.
>
>
> For our app at least, the numbers are close to our actual OS X usage
> figures. Last I checked in September 2013, 20% of Mac users were on OS
> X 10.6. I should be able to get more up to date numbers if that is
> useful.
>
> As for the reason why usage of OS X 10.6 is still high - I think that
> is down to awareness of the need to upgrade and the effort/time vs.
> perceived benefits, as well as hardware compatibility issues. Once
> browsers (FF, Chrome) make a move towards dropping 10.6 support this
> might help awareness.
>
> Regards,
> Rob.
>
>
> I don’t think anybody has mentioned the lack of ability to upgrade
> hardware - mostly because of financial issues, I suppose. 10.6 is as far as
> I know the last Mac OS to support 32 bit systems. Previous versions of my
> own software supported PPC and down to Mac OS 10.4, which gave me a
> considerable user base from that segment. Percentages aside, there’s still
> a LOT of people sitting with old hardware, simply because they cannot
> afford to upgrade.
>
>
But is that a significant part of the Mac OS X users or users of Mac OS X
Qt applications? I seriously doubt so. Let's be realistic, less and less
software are supporting PPC nowadays, the best you can get is a 32/64 bits
binary for Mac OS. Last machines from Apple with 32 bits only processor :
2006.

One other point is that Qt5 is about QML and is pushing towards its usage
on the desktop with better components for it with a modern GL scene graph.
Running on outdated graphic cards with outdated graphic drivers is also not
something people want to bother testing and fixing.

Again let's balance the cost of the maintenance of the code of 10.6 vs
supporting few users stuck in the past? If they must stick in the past for
various reasons (financial or others) then they can just use Qt4, it works
just fine for Mac OS 10.6 or even Qt5 released versions. Why such users
would care of modern Qt5 applications?

I would really understand people pushing for supporting an outdated OS (and
not maintained anymore) on old hardware if they were no alternatives for
them : in that case there are -> Qt4 or Qt 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 even. People want
the benefits for free, how many of the Qt developers/users with outdated
10.6 are actually contributing to fix the port?

Other thing I would recommend your user base to be *very* careful with
their outdated machine as for example Safari is not updated anymore on Snow
Leopard letting the browser very vulnerable to security issues.

XP was introduced in 2001. It’s still supported. Mac OS 10.6 was introduced
> in 2009. I understand the desire to get rid of the messiness under the
> hood, but I think it should be considered that it cuts out users on
> hardware platforms not so much up to date.
>

Right but the difference is that Microsoft was not very good at making a
decent successor of XP which made most of the people stick with XP.


>
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>


-- 
Alexis Menard
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