[QGIS-Developer] Phasing out 32-bit support in QGIS for

[Marco Bernasocchi]

Dear community,

I hope you are doing well in these special times.

As you probably know, building and packaging QGIS for windows is connected
with a bigger workload than all other platforms. Especially when updating
the complete dependencies stack (Qt, GDAL, GEOS, psql,...), this becomes a
mammoth task that Jurgen takes care of. Now double the architectures, and
he gets double the fun...


Based on the user survey, discussions with key developer/users and trend
observations, we decided to phase out 32-bit support on Windows.


tl;dr QGIS will drop 32-bit support on Windows after the QGIS 3.16 release
when we update our Qt dependencies to Qt 5.15.

The Plan

QGIS will drop 32-bit Windows support in the next few months. QGIS 3.16 LTR
will still be available for 32-bit systems. 32-bit support will be dropped
during the process of updating Qt to version 5.15. Due to the complexity of
the involved tasks, there is no fixed date for when this update will happen.

Reasoning

Over the last years, pretty much all new computers (including low-end
machines) have been built with 64-bit processors. Our latest QGIS user
survey (http://blog.qgis.org/2020/04/02/ltr-usage-survey/) confirmed that
this move to 64-bit had been almost completed on the hardware side, and
only 7% of survey respondents indicated that they are still using 32-bit.
Therefore, we have decided to phase out 32-bit support in QGIS since we
have many libraries to update in the next months and we have only limited
resources.

Further roadmap

The update to Qt 5.15 is an important step towards staying in sync with Qt
developments. Qt 5.15 is the minimum version that will provide forward
compatibility with Qt 6. By updating to 5.15, we, therefore, ensure that
QGIS is future proof.

I wish you a great end of the week and look forward to seeing you on
October 30th at the QHackFriday where I'll join Tim in an AMA :)

Cheers Marco


-- 
Marco Bernasocchi

QGIS.org Chair
OPENGIS.ch CEO
http://berna.io
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