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

[Oliver Wolff]

Hi,

On 13.06.2020 09:20, Konrad Rosenbaum wrote:
> 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 kinds of outdated versions of Windows(*) or rather old versions of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.

The topic of some machines that are running medieval versions of windows 
in some factory seems to come up again and again. While these use cases 
are valid, you also state that the companies "do not touch these running 
systems". So the big question that remains here is the following: Why 
would anyone update Qt on a machine like that? They have been happily 
been running DOS for the last decade and longer. On other systems they 
are using Windows XP or Windows 7. If you cannot update the operating 
system for these systems and are stuck with an unsupported OS, being 
"stuck" with an unsupported Qt version does not sound like a dealbreaker 
to me.

How many of these machines would get a Qt update if Qt 6 supported 
Windows 7?

Olli

> 
> (**)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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