[1] https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0SP1.update/com.qnx....

[2] https://www.mikecramer.com/qnx/momentics_nc_docs/photon/prog...

[1] https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/6/

[2] https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/292/

At the end, I had really beautiful (to my eyes, back then) and very functional desktop, but something went wrong when I made backup before installing SuSE Linux 7.0, so months of vigorous customizing were lost. :-(

But it was fun while it lasted. There were a number of alternative desktop shells in the Windows 95/98 era.

Initially the actual implementation didn't match the conceptual framework, but by version 1.2 they had really cleaned things up.

They also mailed a manual along with the demo disk, and I was amazed that QNX had built-in network bonding, amongst lots of other neat features. At the the time I was using Slackware & the linux kernel version was still 1.x, I don't think bonding came to linux until 2.x?

I'd be honest and say that qnx demo disk had more usability overall than my disk, but one could easily have a usable text only linux bootable disk. Busybox and uclibc already existed back then.

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~spotter/floppy.bin (won't be that useful today due to the ethernet drivers, but it was a 1.44mb floppy)

I’m sure it’s better now, it wasn’t so when QNX had come out.

The kernel processes are actual processes so each of the drivers is fully sandboxed, an error in one bit of code can not cause any other processes to be affected unless you explicitly declare that it should be so (shared memory, for instance) and of course you don't do that.

The reduction of scope alone is worth at least 30 IQ points.

Absolutely rock solid. I built some specialized network devices using QnX and those things ran for a decade+ after first installation. Not a single reboot.

    BARTLET
    By the way, the words you are looking for are, "Oh, good grief!"

Photon or not, I hated the period where they sort of moved to canned BSP deployment only, where in 6.5 I could just develop on a live system. This is nice.

"This environment runs as a virtual machine, using QEMU on Ubuntu. To try the image, you'll need: Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04." So it doesn't boot on bare metal?

Maybe they're trying to get away from needing Windows. The previous recommended development environment was cross-compilation from Windows.

The big news here is that they have a reasonable non-commercial license again.[1] The trouble is, QNX did that twice before, then took it away.[2] Big mistake. They lost their developer base. Support of open source tools on QNX stopped. As I once told a QNX sales rep, "Stop worrying about being pirated and worry about being ignored". They'll need to commit contractually to not yanking the non-commercial license to get much interest.

QNX should be licensed like Unreal Engine. If you ship enough products using it, it gets noticed and they contact you about payments, and if you're not shipping much product, Unreal doesn't care. This has created a big pool of Unreal developers, which, in turn, induces game studios to use Unreal. Unreal's threshold is US$1 million in sales.

Apparently they opened things up a bit last year, but nobody noticed.

Usefully, there is a QNX Board Support Package for the Raspberry PI, so you can target that. QNX would be good for IOT things on Raspberry PI machines, where you don't want the bloat and attack surface of a full Linux installation.

[1] https://qnx.software/en/developers/get-started/getting-start...

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/11/qnx_8_freeware/

That sounds quite a bit harder to enforce for an OS designed to run inside, often not internet-connected, devices.

Correct me if I'm wrong but these and other Linux patches were always about soft real time and Linux never had hard real time capability because of its architecture.

In case you're not aware: CDE is still around, open source, and runs on modern unix-likes.

[1] https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3

[2] https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

Oh I'm aware :) also this beauty from SGI is now around again:

https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/

QNX will shift focus in a year or two.

275M cars with QNX, https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2025/12/19/blackberry-...

AI/robotics, https://qnx.software/en/industries/robotics

Some comments mentioning QNX can run Swift code makes me think of it could also run iPhone apps.

While Blackberry exited the phone market, I’m surprised to know QNX is still the most popular os for cars. With 275 million devices running it atm.

Not at all. That is like saying because it can run C, it can run windows apps. To run iPhone apps you would need all the libraries and runtimes ported, including the whole GUI. Just not happening.

It's great that Apple are pushing Swift out there a bit, but honestly if they want the World to catch fire with it, they need to give away the Crown Jewels and get SwiftUI out there as well.

Meanwhile, it's great that QNX is supporting modern languages. I can imagine having a bit of fun with this developer desktop and seeing how modern tooling plays nicely with it.

it run qt and does everything else so it is often an easy choice.

I think it's a real shame Blackberry didn't manage to etch a third (or fourth - I also loved Palm's WebOS) niche for their QNX-based phones. Blackbberry 10 was an amazing mobile OS.

On at least one occasion, the license was changed overnight leaving a large enthusiast community in the lurch.

Given the history, there's every reason to suspect that there'll be yet more rug-pulls in the future.

Then they did exactly the same thing again a few years later.

And now, for the 3rd time, they are offering a “free” non-commercial license.

https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-testing/issues/868

We run into a lot of OEMs who switch to Linux because of AGL and come crawling back to QNX many expensive months later to start over with a viable solution so they can deliver.

I know it's a microkernel which is inherently cool to me, but I don't know what else it buys you.

Can anyone here give me a high-level overview of why QNX is cool?

Sadly not anymore, Qnet was removed in 8.0

In general QnX was commercially mismanaged and technically excellent. I'm imagining a world where they clued in early on that an open source real time OS would have run circles around the rest of the offerings and they'd have cleaned up on commercial licensing. Since the 80's they've steadily lost mind and marketshare though I suspect they'll always be around in some form.

I've also noticed that all of the message passing system calls still accept the node ID. Are there plans to open up this interface to allow for implementation of custom network managers, maybe? I'd be very interested in exploring that.

It's also really compact. This used to be a great selling point for underpowered car infotainment systems. Some cars had around 1Mb of RAM for their infotainment, yet they were able to run fairly complex media systems.

QNX is also used for non-UI components, just as a good realtime OS.

They were also early adopters of Eclipse, which was the "default IDE" before the advent of VS Code.

In theory I'd be tempted to try, in practice not, because of all the back and forth between changing owners in the past, and resulting policies regarding availability.

I'm also very well served by some 'gaming distro', where nothing ever stutters or lags, on almost obsolete hardware, mostly clocked down to 800Mhz, with uptimes of up to 150 days. More isn't really useful anyways, because of updates.

But hey, Wayland! On QNX! With XFCE on top of that! Who would have thought?

What about photonic Plasma instead of some Generic ToolKit?

They do list "A native Desktop image on Raspberry Pi" under What's Next, so hopefully soon:)

> In theory I'd be tempted to try, in practice not, because of all the back and forth between changing owners in the past, and resulting policies regarding availability.

Yeah, that gives me pause too. There was some noise earlier about open sourcing it; I do wish they'd actually do that.

The latter is actually a common setup, used by Mercedes-Benz and Hangsheng if I'm not mistaken.

[1] https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/8.0/com.qnx.doc.neutrino...

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/nto-qnx.htm...

You can already get a free license for QNX and grab a BSP (board support package) to create a bare metal image. You have been able to for quite a while. People who understand how a computer works, what a device driver is and how and when to use one, are not the target for this demo. It's targeted at the people who think the user interface is the software and the desktop GUI is the operating system.

And stopped.

https://hackaday.com/2017/05/03/your-next-desktop-qnx/

Granted, this is not the full Plasma shell, but you can run a lot of KDE software on it just fine.

Running on Core i5 7500t and Core i7 7700t with integrated intel HD630 graphics on Lenovo M910q tiny with 32GB RAM. Mostly clocked down to 800Mhz. Chosen path: systemd-boot, Btrfs, ZRAM, Plasma/KDE.

Edit:

I'm also not gaming btw, just heavy browser use, and some LibreOffice. So if you expect to get insane FPS in 4K(on old systems!), that probably wouldn't work. What does work is having (a heavily customized) FF working with uBo with usually 4 FF-windows open, and each of them at least several dozen tabs, almost always one of them playing some music from YT without a hitch. Doing other stuff on other virtual desktops (I run 3 by 3). 4K videos with mpv no problem. With VLC neither, but I deinstalled that because I don't need so much UI and features. Matter of taste. Shrug. Remoting by whichever means. Even experimenting with small local LLMs like Deepseek R1:8B via Ollama. Though that brings the systems to their limits, spinning up the fan hard, and going allcore 3.1GHz :-)

Feels like BBSsing in the days of analog modems :-)

(Because 'thinking' for minutes, and answers trickle in like text at 300 to 1200 baud, or so)

But still, while doing so, music from YT doodling on, even whith EasyEffects, no scratches, klicks, distortions, whatever.

System stays responsive, no matter if I'm shuffling files in Dolphin/Krusader, torturing LibreOffice Calc, reading some website, PDF, downloading something, be it via browser/Kget or Ktorrent, remote desking, conferencing...

It's all just flowing very smoothly.

Bliss.

Because it just works.

(On my hardware, which may change if you have to use other drivers for AMD, Nvidia, or later intel graphics. Or your firmware/UEFI is buggy/broken.)

Editoftheedit:

Oh! Did I mention suspend to RAM and wakeup is working perfectly? Every single time! The same goes for Wake on LAN, or netbooting.

(cackling madly)

I'd agree using qnx.software rather than qnx.com is kinda dumb though.

  Developer:  BlackBerry (formerly QNX Software Systems)
  
  On April 9, 2010, Research In Motion (later renamed to BlackBerry Limited) announced they would acquire QNX Software Systems from Harman International Industries.

That said, like IBM and Microsoft, they've also been on and off over the years about whether tinkerers, desktop, and other uses are welcome. So they probably could benefit from showing that this time they're opening the ecosystem for the long haul.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/markets/stocks/BB-...

Try disabling content/ad blockers.

[1] https://qnx.software/scripts/global/cookie-consent.js

Stop sowing FUD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt