[Interest] Qt 6.5 Is Irrelevant...

[Thiago Macieira]

On Thursday, 22 December 2022 20:40:11 -03 Hamish Moffatt via Interest wrote:
> On 21/12/22 06:38, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
> > On Montag, 19. Dezember 2022 16:59:41 CET Michael Jackson wrote:
> >> So not really a “jolt every 3 years”. You have had 3 _total_ jolts over
> >> the
> >> course of 30 years.
> > 
> > Except them dropping support for pre-AVX, pre-AVX2 CPUs,
> 
> Big Sur (macOS 11), released 2.5 years ago and still supported, runs on
> Macs dating back to 2013. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211238

Indeed, but Mid and Late 2013 is Apple obfuscated speak for "Intel 4th 
Generation Core", a.k.a. Haswell. Those support AVX2. So you're agreeing with 
Allan: Big Sur dropped support for pre-AVX2 machines.

> I suffer from this problem too (users sticking to old OS releases), but
> I don't think Apple is being too unreasonable in this particular case.

No. The 2.5-year-old OS that is still supported supports hardware that is 8.5 
years old now.

The problem is whether less than 9 years old is reasonable. If you're used to 
the Windows or Linux world, it's not. Microsoft still supports the same 
processors that 64-bit Windows supported when it launched. They only increase 
the memory and disk space requirements, something that Windows users are often 
able to adapt to more than the processor. In fact, Microsoft is so fixed on 
compatibility that they even forego optimisations we've taken for granted in 
macOS and Linux, such as vectorised memcpy().

And on Linux, everything is supported. If you don't like that Red Hat 9 now 
requires SSE4.2, you can use other distros. Debian still supports non-SSE2 
i386 (I know that because we broke it[*] again for 6.5; there's an open bug 
report).

[*] read: "Thiago broke it again"
-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Cloud Software Architect - Intel DCAI Cloud Engineering