[Development] [Interest] Windows 7 support will be dropped in Qt 6

[Philippe]

I hardly see many users that need to stick to an old Windows version to be keen,
on another hand, to update to the brand new Qt 6.
That would be paradoxal, few would do this.
And that's not the end of Qt for these Windows 7 users anyway, as they
will be able to use Qt 5.15 for a long time. 

Philippe

On Thu, 11 Jun 2020 14:41:34 +0200
Oliver Wolff <oliver.wolff at qt.io> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> with Qt 6 approaching it is time to have a look at our set of supported 
> platforms.
> 
> One candidate for removal of support was Windows 7. Some considerations 
> about dropping this support have been communicated on Qt's development 
> mailing list in March last year [1] and there were some discussions 
> about this topic on the corresponding bug report [2]
> 
> The operating system was initially launched in 2009 and reached its 
> official end of life in January 2020. That means that Microsoft no 
> longer provides security updates and instances running Windows 7 should 
> be replaced as soon as possible.
> 
> With this official Microsoft standing in mind our current plan is to 
> remove support for Windows 7 in Qt 6.0 onwards. Qt 6.0 release is 
> planned towards the end of 2020, roughly one year after Windows 7’s end 
> of life.
> 
> Of course, we do not make decisions like this easily or to upset our 
> users but there are clear advantages that speak in favor of dropping 
> support:
>      - We can rely on Windows functions being available instead of 
> trying to dynamically load libraries which might or might not be available.
>      - We can use functionality that only became available in later 
> Windows versions unconditionally. One example of this can be UWP APIs 
> which are Microsoft's "new way of writing APIs". Our new graphics 
> abstraction (RHI) can also rely on newer features being available on 
> Windows
>      - We can focus our Windows resources on bug fixes and new 
> functionality instead of maintaining this "legacy" operating system
>      - CI resources that are used for Windows 7 tests can be used to 
> test other configurations
> 
> Br, Olli
> 
> 
> [1] 
> https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2019-March/035532.html
> [2] https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-74687
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