32-bit Windows end of support planning

We currently offer NSIS, MSI, and PortableApps packages for 32-bit Windows. A surprising number (about a quarter) of our downloads are for these packages, but I suspect that the vast majority of those are on systems that run a 64-bit version of Windows.

Assuming that's the case, should we remove official support for 32-bit Windows in the current master (3.7) branch in advance of the 4.0 release? At a minimum this would mean removing the CI configuration that builds the NSIS, MSI, and PortableApps packages. 32-bit uses would still be able to use the 3.6 packages, which will be supported until at least May 2023.

Microsoft has been deprecating 32-bit support in Windows for a while, and Windows 11 is 64-bit only. The Qt Company doesn't support 32-bit Windows in Qt 6, which means that we'd either have to build our own Qt libraries or keep shipping our 32-bit packages with Qt 5.

Update, 2022-02-18

As shown in !6184 (merged), 32-bit platforms no longer get much attention on the development side. I can't speak for others, but all of my Wireshark build environments are 64-bit only and have been for some time. "Win32 Package" is our only 32-bit GitLab CI job and it's becoming more and more of an outlier as time goes on.

Update, 2022-04-19

We're extending the lifetime of the 3.6 branch to 30 months, to May 22, 2024. We will not ship 32-bit Windows packages for Wireshark 4.0 and later.