[Interest] [Development] Qt 6.5 Is Irrelevant for More than 95% of Mac Desktops

[Michael Jackson]

On 12/18/22, 8:19 AM, "Interest on behalf of Thiago Macieira" <interest-bounces at qt-project.org on behalf of thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:

    On Sunday, 18 December 2022 06:47:57 -03 Nuno Santos wrote:
    > Many people are still running their Intel macs. I speak for myself. I had
    > bought a really powerful quad core Intel mac laptop one year before m1 is
    > out. Is terrible but what am I going to do? Throw it out of the window if
    > it is still able to do the job?

    Your computer is still supported.

    The ones that have fallen out of support with the 11.0 requirement are those 
    older than 2014.

    Please also note the requirement of a system to *develop* with Qt may be even 
    higher than those to *deploy* Qt on, usually because the minimum version of 
    Xcode required may not install on an older OS. Right now, they appear to be 
    the same.

    > The ones who venture in instant updates are the ones who report problems to
    > the plugin makers which can sometime take months to fix the problems.
    [...]
    > My experience is that sometimes people take up to two years to upgrade to a
    > more recent operating system.

    Months is fine. Even a year or two.

    We're talking about someone making no major updates for 3 years.

Yep, that is me and I am also a developer (well at least some days). My reason for not upgrading:

* IMO: Apple continues to degrade my user experience to the point that I simply do not want to update.
* We are not using anything out of C++20 so my Xcode version is still useful.

After realizing 2 things I'm in favor of the cut-off:
 * Qt 6.5 is an LTS which means Qt would be stuck with macOS 10.15 support for 2.5 years _after_ Apple has cut support. The Qt Company would do the same for Windows or Linux so Apple isn't being treated any differently.
* Qt 6.4 is still around in source form for those that need to stick with 10.15 support.

Every software company that develops dependent libraries goes through this process. They cannot make everyone happy and they cannot simply support every operating system forever. I think keeping support for as long as they did was acceptable. Been using an M1 for development for the last few weeks and just for the speed and battery improvement alone I can deal with the (IMO) crappy UI changes.

Cheers
Mike Jackson