On Tuesday, 24 February 2026 06:43:03 Pacific Standard Time Jeffrey Walton wrote: > Windows 10 still has a 36% share of desktop markets. Despite what > Microsoft declares by fiat. Confer, < > https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share>. Windows 10 > support is definitely not ready to be deprecated in Qt. > > Personally, I feel one should not consider dropping support until market > share falls below 3% or 5%. I realize others do not share the sentiment.
The problem for keeping support, as Oliver reported, is that the CI infrastructure will itself start dropping it. As Windows 10 stops getting security upgrades, it becomes unwise for the CI to keep it. Systems with no security support need to be kept in especially-designed lab networks. Plus it's expensive to keep an OS mix, in particular if that OS is not free (Windows) or requires specialised hardware (macOS). So there's both an economical and security situation to deal with. The problem with dropping Windows 10 is that Windows 11 has raised the minimum system requirements. While it is a free upgrade to anyone who uses Windows 10, it's not available to everyone's computer. For example, it only runs on systems with a TPM v2, which drops support for most computers older than 2017 and definitely older than 2015. It also dropped support for 32-bit x86, but those processors stopped being commercialised around 2012, and Qt hasn't really catered for them for a long time. Oliver suggested Qt 6.12 LTS being the last to support it. Since that release is still 9 months away, I think we can tentatively agree to the plan and see how the market share evolves. I don't think we will reach the 5% Jeff is suggesting (Win7 didn't drop below that until March 2023 for example), but we can evaluate at the 6.13 branch time whether to grant Windows 10 a few more releases, or if the 6.13 branch can start dropping Windows 10 from the CI. Also note this is about official support. We don't plan on yanking the code out from the codebase. People who have an interest in Windows 10 or even Windows 8.1 are welcome to test the build and submit fixes were we unknowingly broke things. We have had some. -- Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com Principal Engineer - Intel DCG - Platform & Sys. Eng.
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