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

[Roland Hughes]

On 6/11/20 1:47 PM, Michael Jackson wrote:
> 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.

Personally I don't think anyone should be running a virus known as 
Windows on any computer.

Having said that, there are many many many many many reasons to never 
update, especially to the Windows 8 trash heap, and most people don't 
want to _have_ to have an Internet connection blasting ads at them while 
they play Solitaire.

There are major corporations still running Windows XP, let alone 7, 
because they have critical systems written and running on that OS. The 
tool or whatever cannot port forward or costs massive amounts of money 
to bring forward. Just today someone told me about one of GM's factories 
in Europe is run by a highly customized "canned" factory control system 
written in VB5. When people show up to the factory, it makes vehicles 
every day.

You can't have rolling upgrades on critical systems, you just can't.  
Upgrading is a multi-million dollar cost adding nothing to the bottom 
line. They really don't care if a third party developer's life is any 
easier, that developer isn't on the payroll and they have an 
auto-renewing can only be cancelled for non-payment support contract.

Windows 7 is EOL in marketing only.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4537813/windows-7-update-kb4537813

https://www.ghacks.net/2020/06/09/microsoft-windows-security-updates-june-2020-overview/

Most systems written for large corporations stay in place roughly 30 
years. New systems have to be added to the same platform "because it is 
there" or because the data is all there. Nobody really cares about some 
Internet or remote hacker vulnerability because the bulk of these 
systems are air-gapped. They have no outside world connection. If they 
are on a network it is a local internal network. I've seen companies run 
Pathworks or Token Ring on these systems sans any IP stack, just 'cause 
it's a control system in a factory and the only "net" access they want 
it to have is Sneaker Net.

I'm willing to bet CAT is still using WinCE. They were as of less than a 
year ago because a contract hit my inbox.

I don't know how, but Agco has their own version of DOS and is somehow 
using Qt. I almost took that contract just to find out how anyone pulled 
that off. Had they said Zinc it wouldn't have shocked me, but they were 
talking to me about doing Qt work and said they were running their own 
embedded DOS and this work would be new screens added to the existing 
screens.

One cannot view the world as whatever tiny x86 platform is currently on 
the shelf at Best Buy because that is not how the bulk of the world 
operates. Many of these things got embedded into heavy equipment and 
assembly line control units. They will not need HiDPI tweaks because 
their touch screens won't be that advanced, but they will need fixes for 
core classes. Most won't care about QML and JavaScript because almost 
nobody used it in that world.

As I said, I don't personally care about Windows. If Qt drops support 
for Windows 7 going forward it will simply shove a big chunk of current 
users (who aren't using QML and JavaScript) to CopperSpice because it 
claims to still be supporting Windows via MinGW all the way back to 
Windows Vista.

https://www.copperspice.com/docs/cs_overview/supported-platforms.html

You cannot force customers to "upgrade" but you can force them to leave.

Just my 0.002 cents.

-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593

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