I always liked their original UI - Photon[1][2]. Very lightweight and fast. Also a distinct and consistent style. I understand why they dropped it in favor of Qt and later Web technologies, but it's still a big loss.
Oooooh, that's a blast from the past! I used to use LiteStep for about 6-9 months in 2000, before I started using GNU/Linux.
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.
Yes while it makes sense to reuse stuff that is already being built, my heart sank when I saw the screenshot while expecting seeing the photon microgui which to me was the nicest skeuomorphic one.
Glad to see QNX still progressing. I worked there as an intern twice in Ottawa and they're pretty damn good. Great place to work imo. I met some of the kernel devs there. Had the priviledge of working with one and he taught and demoed some of the kernel features to me. They gave us interns a full summer course on kernels, C programming, OS and some hardware. Fun times.
We still do that! In fact, the _QNX From The Board Up_ series on the developer blog is a small rip from that training content, adapted by Mr Brown. I hope we'll get all of it out there for everyone to benefit from in 2026 :)
It was mind blowing at the time because Linux required at least 4-5 floppies to set up a text-only base system while QNX ran live from just a single 1.44MB.
Photon microGUI was included in that, and it blew my mind that you could literally kill and restart Photon without disturbing any of the GUI apps that were still running.
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?
And none of them can hold a candle to QnX. I've used a whole raft of them and QnX stands heads and shoulders above the competition. The consistency of the implementation is extremely impressive.
Show me another OS that you can undress to the kernel, a console, a file system and a disk driver and then build it all up again without missing a beat.
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.
I think the market is moving to "mixed criticality" so you can use Linux for your entertainment system but then also use a proper RTOS for the car stuff all in the same SoC.
Photon was what I was hoping for before I clicked the link. One of my favourite GUIs, closely tied with CDE.
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.
Me too, although it's been a long time since Photon.
"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.
> They lost their developer base. Support of open source tools on QNX stopped.
Right. These days it's better to invest into Redox OS[1] as a potential substitute for it (if work on real time capability). And with real time patches merged into Linux mainline[2] QNX doesn't stand much chance today too.
> And with real time patches merged into Linux mainline[2] QNX doesn't stand much chance today too.
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.
It’s really sad it wasn’t open sourced. In the early 2000s I was triple booting Windows 98, BeOS, and QNX. BeOS was my favorite, but QNX Neutrino was great as well.
There is also a FWWM[1] "skin" that doesn't require long time abandoned C code - NsCDE[2]. It still requires X server (just like CDE itself) which becomes rarity these days. They need to port it to Wayland eventually.
I learned C on QNX (back then, it booted from a floppy on a PC/XT). It was a nice little Unix-like OS, with all the things you'd expect from a nice little Unix-like OS, plus a reputation of being rock-solid like nothing else.
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.
As someone who still uses a QNX phone, the Blackberry Q10 as my second phone, I’m not just optimistic for the return of the cross-platform and secure os, I’m rooting for it.
Especially for portable Linux handhelds.
If Blackberry were to release a phone tomorrow, it would instantly be the most secure android phone. I still run some of my favourite android apps on my BB10os via the android translation layer.
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.
> QNX can run Swift code makes me think of it could also run iPhone apps.
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.
Swift is probably less than 1% of the what it takes to run iPhone apps, you can get Swift for Windows too, but it is nowhere near able to run iPhone apps. The problem is all the libraries an iPhone app expects to be available on the host OS, all the multimedia stuff and so on, those libraries on iPhone are large and advanced, and not available for porting to any OS outside of Apple.
Swift != SwiftUI. You need the latter to run modern iOS apps written in Swift.
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.
They've moved back and forth between being partially source-available and fully closed source at least twice. It's a similar story with usage licenses, with hobbyist and non-commercial access variously being granted and then pulled away multiple times.
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.
It's not a hard-running race. PREEMPT_RT is soft realtime and if you rely on it for your brakes you're going to crash. AGL has not yet produced any kind of usable system that can be certified for functional safety under ISO 26262 or IEC 61508. Just a core kernel with no drivers.
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've only ever used QNX in the form of Blackberry products (mostly the Playbook), so I am afraid I don't what the advantages of it would be compared to Linux or something.
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?
Hard real time (so latency guarantees), microkernel (and they actually mean it, so your device drivers can't hose your system), standardized networked IPC including network transparency for all services, ISRs at the application level.
Oh! I only worked with it commercially prior to that so I never got the memo. What an insanely stupid move. That was one of their USPs.
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.
There's been talk about this on Reddit too, where our chief architect of QNX 8 broke down the decision. He mentioned it was ultimately a tough decision, but that in the end the cons outweighed the pros.
Such decisions should always involve the customers. A chief architect that knocks one of the foundation stones out from under a building isn't doing the bureau they work for any favors.
QNX is hard realtime. At one point, its kernel had O(1) guarantees for message passing and process switching. It could have been rewritten without any loops. I'm not sure if that's still true.
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.
I think it is mostly used for non-UI stuff. I could be wrong but outside of car infotainment I've never seen it used for UI stuff. Mostly it just sits headless quietly running some branch of industry that we all depend on. The joke used to be that if QnX had a y2k bug that had been missed civilization would end and never mind windows because you won't have any water, food, energy or transportation anymore.
We'll see if it reaches bare metal some time, instead of relying on QEMU(on Ubuntu).
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?
> We'll see if it reaches bare metal some time, instead of relying on QEMU(on Ubuntu).
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.
> We'll see if it reaches bare metal some time, instead of relying on QEMU
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.
Yah, I know that. But the licensing swings aside, I've just thought 'are you on crack?' because of the Eclipse on Windows cross- compiling thing, which they've done when I last looked.
It’s also running virtualized in a lot of cars! Although I’ve seen more and more US car companies switching from QNX to Linux. Chinese car companies I’ve worked with all use Linux instead of QNX, so perhaps that is the future.
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.
People in the industry would know that QNX has been around since the 90s (or 80s?) as a very solid embedded GUI platform. They're a company that doesn't need to prove their credentials.
I'd agree using qnx.software rather than qnx.com is kinda dumb though.
Sure, it's been around 40 years, but it's not like old companies haven't changed owners many times. So, for instance, QNX is now part of Harman which is part of Samsung.
Their main website is a black page. No idea if someone bought the brand or if it is the original people behind this 40 year old project. Both the wikipedia and the website only mention "canada" in passing but no information is given on company and people behind it. Nothing that can be verified.
Hiya! The bulk of my colleagues and I are in Ottawa and Waterloo Ontario Canada. We're a division of BlackBerry Limited, and have been for about 15 years. QNX itself is about 45+ years old, having come out of an OS course at the University of Waterloo. I work with a lot of people who are celebrating 25-35 year anniversaries -- very much still a lot of the same engineering and product talent here through all of the transitions.
The footer of the website just says "Join the Discord Community - Reddit: r/qnx - Instagram: qnx_devrel - Powered by Ghost". There is no imprint and the "about" link also does not give any info.
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.
QNX is the backbone of the auto industry, and powers over 200 million cars on the road. For the target demographic, I don't imagine they need to "build trust" any more than IBM or Microsoft need to build trust.
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.
[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.
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’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.
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.
Right. These days it's better to invest into Redox OS[1] as a potential substitute for it (if work on real time capability). And with real time patches merged into Linux mainline[2] QNX doesn't stand much chance today too.
[1] https://doc.redox-os.org/book/microkernels.html
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/real-time-linux-is-o...
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.
Oh I'm aware :) also this beauty from SGI is now around again:
https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/
[1] https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3
[2] https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
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.
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.
QNX will shift focus in a year or two.
https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-testing/issues/868
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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