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

[Christoph Cullmann]

On 2020-06-11 18:06, Frederik Schwarzer wrote:
> Am 11.06.2020 17:32 schrieb Christoph Cullmann:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> 
>> I think a lot of developers/companies will have pain because of this,
>> if they have
>> 
>> 1) some large customers staying on Windows 7 until really EOL for them
> 
> Not really an opinion about this but this changelog entry from a
> release two weeks ago came to mind.
>     "Updated the included Qt library to version 4.8.7." ;) ... And
> that company has a big market share.
> 
> In the industry lots of companies lag behind ... a ... bit. But I
> would suspect those who lag behind with their Windows version to also
> do not mind lagging behind with their Qt versions.
> And since Qt 5.15 will be supported for quite some time ... But as I
> said, I am not in favor of or against one or another.
> 
> Do you have a customer who actually runs on Windows 7 and is otherwise
> eager to jump on Qt6 in its early releases? I mean, maintaining old
> Windows versions will double in price every year now, so there's some
> pressure at least.

I think there is a misunderstanding: The customer will get some software 
to
use, they don't care if it uses internally Qt X.Y or whatever.

And yes, even if they have Windows 7, they will want a new version of 
the software
with feature X they paid for ;=) They will not even understand why that 
should not
be possible given they have some Windows 7 support contract with 
Microsoft and will
tell you "but it is not EOL for us".

I just wanted to point out that for people building software with Qt, 
this might
mean they will need to maintain two versions of their software to still 
cater all
their Windows customers. Which doubles the pain for them ;=)

And yes, one might argue this is a sole issue for the people building 
such software,
but this issue doesn't arise for them if they use an other toolkit that 
doesn't
deprecate Windows 7 now.

Greetings
Christoph

-- 
Ignorance is bliss...
https://cullmann.io | https://kate-editor.org