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

[Oliver Wolff]

Hi Kevin,

On 16.06.2020 19:25, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Edward Welbourne wrote:
>> Kevin Kofler (16 June 2020 12:08)
>>> What "shiny new features"? All that a real-world application such as
>>> KWrite really needs from the operating system has been there at least
>>> since the 1990s, possibly since the 1970s.
>>
>> and I guess it's been in Qt for several releases now, so why would
>> someone with those needs care about upgrading to Qt 6 ?
> 
> Because all KDE applications will have to get ported to Qt 6 soon.
> 
> You seem to be completely disconnected from how things work in the Free
> Software community, and only seeing the commercial viewpoint.

Of course this is once again from "inside that evil company", but I want 
to add something here: Lots of people inside that evil company *do care* 
about the open source community *greatly*. There have been heated 
discussions about some recent decisions that have been made inside the 
company and there was quite some disagreement internally as well. We are 
not all the "evil corporate overlords" some people might envision when 
they see a @qt.io mail address.

Having said that, the decision of dropping support Windows 7 is neither 
to alienate the open source community as you claim, nor to upset the 
commercial customers as others say. In the end it all boils down to the 
available "resources" and where we want/are able to spend our time.

We do not have an unlimited number of developers, nor do we have 
infinite processing power or an infinite number of tests systems/QA 
engineers. We do have to decide, where development/CI/QA time is spent 
best independently of open source or commercial users.

In an ideal world, we would have enough developers to easily maintain 
all the parts that are needed to have Windows 7 support. Be it in 
working around missing functionality, that is only available in later 
Windows versions or making the new graphics abstraction work on Windows 
7 as well. We are not in this situation though. Our "resources" (I don't 
like calling developers resources :X ) are limited and Windows isn't the 
most loved operating system when it comes to contributions from the open 
source community.

We did have to make a decision here. We neither targeted commercial 
customers nor opern source users, but we have to decide, where to spend 
"our time". Unfortunately Windows 7 is not a priority in this, as there 
still is much to be done for Qt 6 and we just do not have the number of 
hands to keep all these balls in the air.

I guess this won't help much when it comes to calming down people, but I 
wanted to reiterate how we came to this decision. This really isn't 
about upsetting users.

Olli

> 
>          Kevin Kofler
> 
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