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

[Jérôme Godbout]

Nothing force you to upgrade to Qt6, you can still make evolve that application into Qt 5.15 as long as your user still use Windows 7.  Windows 7 is old, the days of keeping old OS around have been over for 10 years IMO. Everything is moving to evergreen (OS, Web browser, application...). Otherwise those only make security and support a nightmare. Windows 10 was free upgrade for a while for a good reason. I don't see why Qt should support that platform any longer since Microsoft doesn't even support it anymore. Yes software deprecated way faster then hardware now a day it's the way things are. Keeping an OS for 10-15 years won't happen again, no more XP going to last that long anymore.

If you want to stick with old OS stick with old version, nothing bad doing this, but don't expect new bleeding edge stuff on it. What was running should still be running on it. You cannot have both way, those are just painful. 

Make a good preview version with Qt 6 and try to lure them to upgrade to Windows 10 along with it (or Windows 11 by the time Qt 6 and you get your application ready "Microsoft will release Windows 11 on July 29, 2020, and will be available to the general public." ). But keep your main devel focus on the maximal version that cover your user basis.

-----Original Message-----
From: Interest <interest-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Christoph Cullmann
Sent: June 11, 2020 12:36 PM
To: Frederik Schwarzer <bugfinger at posteo.de>
Cc: interest at qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Interest] [Development] Windows 7 support will be dropped in Qt 6

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...
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