MacOS support; agenda item ESC

[Eivind Samseth]

> On 9 May 2020, at 22:02, Ilmari Lauhakangas <ilmari.lauhakangas at libreoffice.org> wrote:
> 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 <https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/macos/desktop/worldwide>
Cool, 10.10 and 10.11 has the same hardware support so we could safely bump to 10.11 (4.7% market share)

10.12 (Sierra) is at 5.9% and has the same hardware support as the still supported 10.13 High Sierra (13.8%)

-> Bumping to 10.13 would cut off up to 7.9% of macOS users, requiring 2 year older iMacs, 1 year older MacBooks, 3 year older MBP, 2 year older MBA, 1 year older mac mini, 2 year older Mac Pro (~2010 hardware is required, so 10 year old)

> 
> 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.”)

If that is an important feature, then it would make sense to set the minimum OS as 10.14 Mojave that has Metal support as the hardware requirement (generally macs from 2012 or older)

That would cut off up to 27.6% of macOS users by statcounter - note that some of these have newer hardware and could upgrade (~2012 hardware required, so 8 year old)

It’s not the default, but there’s an option to send OS information to LO when checking for updates. Have anyone looked at that data?

Eivind
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