[Interest] Windows 10's EOL in Qt

[Oliver Wolff]

Hey everyone,

You might have heard that Windows 10 has officially reached its end of 
life on 14.10.2025.

Due to the operating system's popularity Windows 10 is currently covered 
in Microsoft's Extended Security Updates (ESU) program.

For consumers this means that the operating system will receive security 
fixes until 13.10.2026, see for some information 
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/extended-security-updates.

For commercial users the program will run for three years (until 
10.10.2028) and comes with increasing costs per device per year, see 
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/extended-security-updates.

Considering these time lines I think it is time to think about Windows 
10 end of life in Qt. My suggestion would be to have 6.12 LTS as Qt's 
last release that will include support for Windows 10. This should give 
consumers a chance to use this version during their ESU period and the 
LTS nature of this release will give commercial users enough time to 
prepare for an operating system and Qt version change. With 6.12 LTS 
phase (until 2023) we even go beyond Microsoft's promises for this 
operating system.

Having said that I think we cannot drop support before 6.12. Users and 
customers rely on Qt being available on that (still popular) operating 
system.

To make users and developers aware of the looming removal of support I 
would add a to our supported platforms page 
(https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtdoc/+/713611).

Any feedback on the topic is welcome. Do not hesitate to shout.

Best,
Olli