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

Michael Jackson mike.jackson at bluequartz.net
Thu Jun 11 19:45:44 CEST 2020


On 6/11/20, 12:46 PM, "Interest on behalf of Frederik Schwarzer" <interest-bounces at qt-project.org on behalf of bugfinger at posteo.de> wrote:
    Am 11.06.2020 18:36 schrieb 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.

    Yep, indeed. I had a different view on the "customer" thing because for 
    us, the customers mostly deliver the software. :)

    I get your point now.

    Cheers
    Frederik


Windows 7 is EOL. Period. If it costs you, as a developer, additional money to support an EOL'ed, unsupported version of an operating system then you will need to pass that onto the customer. By still supporting Windows 7 we, as developers, are just enabling those customers to keep from updating. There are very few real reasons *not* to update to at least Windows 8. At some point the customer needs to understand that they are not going to get any new features. They current piece of software will keep working (Assuming a perpetual license) but nothing new will be supported. I've had requests to back port our software to CentOS 6 and once you explain the cost to them for us to maintain all the extra development hardware, extra engineering to develop codes that are not supported on the old compilers, it becomes cost prohibitive to maintain those versions.

+1 to remove Windows 7 support.
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      BlueQuartz Software
[e] mike.jackson at bluequartz.net
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