[Development] [Interest] Qt 6.5 Is Irrelevant for More than 95% of Mac Desktops

[Thiago Macieira]

On Sunday, 18 December 2022 03:25:14 -03 coroberti wrote:
> > What matters to me is that those were the last AVX-incapable CPUs, which
> > allow us to assume that AVX2 is present.
> 
> Dear Thiago and Tuukka,
> It seems that you are working under an assumption that if the HW allows it,
> users will upgrade their Mac OS.

Yes, we are. More importantly, we are assuming that even if they put upgrading 
off for a while (I haven't upgraded to 13.x yet), they will get there at some 
point before Apple stops issuing security updates for that OS. I use my Mac 
Mini in a professional basis, which means I am *required* by company policy to 
keep it up-to-date with security fixes. My previous Mac Mini (an early 2012 
model) had to be returned back to IT for recycling when Apple stopped offering 
updates for it.

> This is not how it works in reality, sorry.
> 
> Many, if not most, Mac users are upgrading only once.
> They upgrade, see how their content-editing, multimedia, etc. software
> is ruined by their first upgrade;
> next, they work with software vendors to restore their applications
> back to some working state, get the lesson and ... do not touch it forever.

That's bad. But we all know who's to blame here, in both arguments: Apple.

> Try to listen to the people that work with the real, live customers
> like Nuno and me.

We have. The decision is that we need to make a cut and move on, eventually. 
There's only so much resource available for handling different generations. We 
decided to adopt Apple's own end-of-life as ours.

> Please, add one more old Mac OS release to the supported list to be
> more realistic, so it will be not a thin three releases but at least four.

At this point, since my AVX2 changes have been postponed to 6.6, I don't mind 
restoring 10.15 support in 6.5, as it doesn't impact me and the improvements I 
plan to add. So I won't object.

But I can't speak for Qt Company's resource commitment, with the need to *add* 
13.x to their test base. I think we all agree that MUST be tested. Given a 
finite resource allocation, something will need to give and they will have to 
make that choice.

Moreover, 6.5 is one of their LTS. They have to make a choice whether they 
want to keep 10.15 in support for the lifetime of that LTS. That would mean 
they'd *end* support 2.5 years after Apple last provided a security update for 
the OS. Their own networking requirements may imply they *can't* have that OS 
in the CI because of its lack of security fixes. I don't know what it takes for 
them to allow that; I can only tell you that if Intel were hosting such 
systems, those would need to be in a special lab with no direct Internet 
access, which means they couldn't be part of a CI.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Cloud Software Architect - Intel DCAI Cloud Engineering