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

[Konrad Rosenbaum]

On 2020-06-12 02:44, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On 12/6/20 10:17 am, Scott Bloom wrote:
>> Why is Win7 being dropped?  I (my company) has gotten burned pretty
>> hard by the dropping of CentOS 6, similar reasons listed for win7..
>
> It's funny that there's so much discussion about dropping Windows 7
> which was released 11 years ago.
>
> Yet Qt 5.15 already dropped macOS prior to 10.13, which is not even 3
> years old. And Qt trunk requires 10.14, which is only 2 years old.
> This is really a major PITA.


From an industry perspective: I have seen lots of machines running all
kinds of outdated versions of Windows(*) or rather old versions of
RedHat or embedded Linux(**), but it has been a very very long time
since I have seen a machine running some Apple product of any version.
I.e. there are plenty of Windows users who have the bucks to demand long
term support for their systems, the same cannot be said for Apple users.

(*)if you walk into a running factory it is pretty normal to find a
large portion of the machines running XP, I would not be surprised to
find a W2k machine or even a machine running DOS in a factory that has
been running for 15 years. New factories will have plenty of machines
running Win7, because new OSes is simply not what the machine suppliers
care about most.

(**)you will regularly find machines running a 2.6 kernel, some may even
run 2.4. Many GUIs look suspiciously Motif-like and if you get to see
the window manager behind the full-screen GUI it may look eerily CDE-ish
or FVWM-like.

Industry is willing to pay large amounts of support and maintenance
costs for the machines they run - this is what keeps people like Roland
and me well fed. Unless you can find a large industry or two that care
about legacy MacOS and are willing to pay tons of money for support, it
will stay bleeding edge because maintenance cost goes up exponentially
with the number of systems you have to support.



    Konrad


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