MuseScore 4.0 Nightly MacOS Compatibility

• Feb 22, 2021 - 07:45

I just tried to install the latest nightly build for MacOS and it seems that it's not compatible with any MacOS X version older than 10.14, and I happen to have 10.13.6.
Will the final version of MuseScore 4 going to be only compatible for MacOS X 10.14 onwards? Or is it something that only applies for the nightly builds made until now?


Comments

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

That's what it says in the docs for Qt 5.15:
Qt 5.15 Doc.png
7 and more year old Macs cannot be updated. That's the end. This is a real pity, because the computer would certainly have no problems with MuseScore 4. After all, MS is not Cyberpunk 2077 or something similarly resource-hungry. I think FOSS is supposed to make programs accessible to everyone and should therefore run on older computers – it's also more environmentally friendly.
I never had such "compatibility jumps" with GTK programs!

Attachment Size
Qt 5.15 Doc.png 40.56 KB

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Yes, too bad, I would have liked to have a look at it. The audio output went crazy on Windows, so I thought I'd try it on the old Mac. For Mac users it's just terrible with skipping multiple OS versions, many older Macs are suddenly excluded. Probably most machines with Win32 are much older.

In reply to by enkidu

They'd need to be able to run Windows 8.1 or 10, the only remaining supported versions of Windows (Windows 7 might still work, but is unsupported), that already excludes a lot of older machines.
Up tp MuseScore 3 macOS was supported for much older versions/machines then ever for Windows.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

You mean MS1-2, right? I was referring to the underlying hardware that is tied to a final macOS version. My old Macbook would run Windows 10 64bit with no problems. However, Apple releases a new version about every year and stops providing new OS versions after about 7 years of support. You don't have that with WIndows. W10 (32) still runs here on a 2007 PC mummy. The main blame definitely goes to Apple, because the compiling tools (XCode) don't support old systems anymore. But Qt makes quite a jump in compatibility compared to GTK. For example, Scribus (Qt) no longer runs on 10.13, but Gimp, Inkscape, LibreOffice without problems.
Since the file format (MSCZ) has been extended, you can only exchange notes with users of older MS versions via MusicXML files. This is somehow not nice. MuseScore is the (almost) only FOSS WYSIWYG music notation program out there. If it doesn't work under 10.13 (that was the case with Scribus (Qt)) there might be Wine left (I don't know if that works).
The question is: does it have to be the latest Qt version? Are there really so many improvements?
I'll just wait and see if it will run under 10.13 after all. Sorry that I have now made so much fuss about it.

In reply to by enkidu

I mean MuseScore 1, 2 and 3.
If projects like Gimp, Inkscape, LibreOffice use Qt and stay on an unsupported release of that, like Qt 5.9, whether in order to be able to support macOS 10.10 and 10.11 or for other reasons, that's their decision. These are larger projects too.
By the time MuseScore 4 gets released even the next Qt LTS release 5.12, would be out of support, or would soon be, so is not a futur proof solution.
Then again there seems to be preparations to move away from Qt entirely. Not sure what the exact plans are though.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

By the time MuseScore 4 gets released even the next Qt LTS release 5.12, would out of support, or would soon be, so is not a future proof solution.
OK, that you stick to the support periods is absolutely understandable!
Then again there seems to be preparations to move away from Qt entirely. Not sure what the exact plans are though.
…maybe that's better, as said other software is more conservative with OS compatibility. By the way, Inkscape+GIMP use GTK, not Qt. I only made the comparison because all these programs are from the Linux environment, of course you can't just switch back and forth between development platforms.
Thanks for the information!

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