MacOS support; agenda item ESC

[Ilmari Lauhakangas]

Eivind Samseth kirjoitti 9.5.2020 klo 22.25:
> 
>> On 4 May 2020, at 15:17, Michael Meeks <michael.meeks at collabora.com 
>> <mailto:michael.meeks at collabora.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Thank you; very helpful - I expect Tor may have some time to look at
>> some of these.
> 
> Great!
> 
> Aside, while looking at bug this bug it occurred to me, why does LO 
> support macOS 10.10?
> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101956
> 
> macOS 10.10 was released almost six years ago, and haven’t had security 
> updates since July 2017

Minimum runtime support is evaluated periodically based on OS version 
market share vs. our maintenance burden & potential wins regarding new 
language and platform features.

Since LibO 6.3 release we can see 10.10 market share has fallen 
approximately 2 percentage points to 3.18% of macOS versions in use: 
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/macos/desktop/worldwide

An argument to bump the minimum macOS version based on platform wins 
might be that 10.11 introduced the Metal API and Skia includes a Metal 
backend (described in Skia milestone 83 release notes as actively 
maintained: https://skia.org/user/release/release_notes "MoltenVK 
support removed. Use Metal backend instead.")

Following the end-of-life schedule of OS vendors does not really make 
sense for us. Windows 7 still has 19.44% share of Win versions: 
https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/worldwide/ 
(really promising drop from 33.78% last year, though!)

Ilmari