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.
Indeed. QNX is the coolest OS I ever seen and Photon felt the coolest desktop environment. Although I like XFCE in the Linux context (more than e.g. GNOME), I am sad to see it replaced Photon on QNX. Photon just looked and felt so lovely and came with a visual C++ builder making GUI apps development so nice.
> I understand why they dropped [Photon] in favor of Qt and later Web technologies
The arrows of time branch and spiral, so it's possible that "later" could require some properties of "earlier".
If Photon could not be open-sourced, it could be licensed to a third party for custodian maintenance. If QNX is abandoning Photon forever, would Blackberry object to Photon being cloned for Linux or FreeBSD? That could preserve a future option for QNX to use it again, like XFCE.
Enthusiasts still use Blackberry keyboards on handheld devices in 2025, which sell out in minutes. In a parallel universe, Blackberry.com offers embedded SBC developers self-service purchase and global delivery of the legendary Blackberry keyboard, with Bluetooth for convenience or USB-c for security.
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?
that's not really true. In 2001 I built a single disk linux installation (with a handful of popular nics supported) with X (tiny X with vesafb support) and rdesktop + vnc as a thin client on floppy.
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.
I wish we could get it's competitor TronOS to make a similar desktop version --- the demo of it displaying multiple video windows on an 80186 was jaw-dropping --- a shame the U.S. Trade Commission quashed Japan's Ministry of Education's plans to roll it out nation-wide in schools from elementary up through graduate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
100% this. I had a Passport and it was one of the single lovelist phones I've ever had.
Compared to my Nokia 7710, the last device with the original Psion UI... that was an elegant touchscreen, plus physical buttons, and a replaceable battery, but that was about it.
Compared to my Nokia E90 Communicator...
The keyboard was even better; it charged off a standard MicroUSB port, and had a standard headphone jack; it had way more apps, because it ran Android ones pretty well.
Compared to any Android phone... Vastly unrecognisably better messaging app, with one inbox for all messages and notifications. Square screen so no fighting portrait vs. landscape. Physical keyboard for much more accurate typing -- and scrolling. Google-free.
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.
The bait and switch was around the “free” license for non-commercial use. They got lots of people using it and porting software to it, and then they revoked that free license.
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.
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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.
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.
Toyota has adopted the flutter IVI shell in their newer cars. You could argue that it can also run on QNX but the real push behind it has been the growing interest and effort behind AGL.
QNX hypervisor architecture allows companies to adopt AGL gradually bringing in the productivity benefits of stuff like flutter and Linux. QT is hell, their entire moat has been the automotive industry/highly embedded devices and seeing Flutter chip away at even a small portion of it gives a lot of hope for a better competitive landscape for more productive and performant embedded guis.
Supposedly QNX is used by many car infotainment systems. A hard realtime OS for infotainment? What is the purpose? There are costs associated with using something like QNX. I can understand if you needed to control drivetain with it, but for infotainment why not just use Linux?
Infotainment controls many of car systems. For example, infotainment controls car drive mode, which instantly affects gearbox. Probably requires predictable time delays for certification.
No gpl, and more importantly the gpl 'fans' who can't write a line of code but will scream about gpl violations if they can find anything - even if false.
it run qt and does everything else so it is often an easy choice.
In some cases it could also be an Android guest running as a VM on the QNX Hypervisor, where there are multiple guests (QNX, Android, Linux) making use of the same HW.
I have a Ford Sync 2.5 system which is a cost reduced hardware downgrade from QNX based Sync 3. I'm sure the OS is doing its best while hobbled by a poor management decision but it has lots of bugs that crop up from what appears to be severe RAM shortage coupled with some gradual memory leaks. I have to reboot it regularly when traveling with Android auto. It's always a crap shoot if my phone will connect.
QNX is not a GPOS, so you wouldn't. I mean you _could_, but the real benefit here is hidden within: with the toolchain now included in this image, folks working on QNX projects can now build them right on target. No more messy cross-compilation.
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?
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.
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.
A bit dissapointed by this. You have to create an account, get a license, deploy it and then you get a fucking download manager just for linux and windows to download who knows what that should run on qemu. Why not just give a link to a qemu image with a script that runs it?
In an era where most development-oriented software is downloaded with wget/git clone/[package manager] install, this whole process feels like a slap in the face. And don't get me wrong, this is still a huge upgrade over the InstallShield Wizard of the previous versions, which rarely worked at all, and if it did, it would butcher your /etc/profile, but its still an absolute abomination, bundling an entire JRE for the only rightful architecture x86-64 just to download and unzip a few files.
Xfce uses labwc. It works very well although standard window-management keystrokes don't work. Apart from that, which is a bit of a deal-breaker for me, it's almost indistinguishable.
Marketing looks nice, but why do they make it so hard to build trust? If it's a software focused on developers it's really important to establish trust.
The page on https://devblog.qnx.com/about/ does not show what kind of company it is, who is behind it, and where they are located. Should I expect backdoors? Is it an elaborate front by north korea? Who will be able to remotely execute code on this operating system?
It's nearly 2026 and fake job applications by nation-state threat actors are common. If a new open source project with shiny marketing pops up it would really help if there is some proof that the org behind it consists of humans living in democratic countries.
Edit: The about page links to https://qnx.software/en which only shows a black screen for me.
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.
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.
You should "trust, but verify" and not shoot the messenger. If raising valid concerns that were not addressed by the linked website is FUD for you, so be it. Sourceforge was also a major brand back in the day and nowadays it raises an anti virus alarm if a user visits that website.
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.
[1] https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0SP1.update/com.qnx....
[2] https://www.mikecramer.com/qnx/momentics_nc_docs/photon/prog...
I was expecting to see that, I ended up looking up some old LiteStep themes [1][2] for my fix
[1] https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/6/
[2] https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/292/
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.
Reminds me of HaikuOS.
Indeed. QNX is the coolest OS I ever seen and Photon felt the coolest desktop environment. Although I like XFCE in the Linux context (more than e.g. GNOME), I am sad to see it replaced Photon on QNX. Photon just looked and felt so lovely and came with a visual C++ builder making GUI apps development so nice.
I ever saw.
I have ever seen.
> I understand why they dropped [Photon] in favor of Qt and later Web technologies
The arrows of time branch and spiral, so it's possible that "later" could require some properties of "earlier".
If Photon could not be open-sourced, it could be licensed to a third party for custodian maintenance. If QNX is abandoning Photon forever, would Blackberry object to Photon being cloned for Linux or FreeBSD? That could preserve a future option for QNX to use it again, like XFCE.
Enthusiasts still use Blackberry keyboards on handheld devices in 2025, which sell out in minutes. In a parallel universe, Blackberry.com offers embedded SBC developers self-service purchase and global delivery of the legendary Blackberry keyboard, with Bluetooth for convenience or USB-c for security.
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.
Funny thing is this got brought up to us in other circles. As a relatively new person to QNX photon seems to have a special place in people's hearts
I still see it used in manufacturing.
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 :)
Sometimes I wish I could do this for mid career sabbatical.
Well hey, we're hiring! qnx.com/careers!
This is a major throwback to the QNX demo disk, which bundled a browser and desktop environment onto a single floppy disk!
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?
that's not really true. In 2001 I built a single disk linux installation (with a handful of popular nics supported) with X (tiny X with vesafb support) and rdesktop + vnc as a thin client on floppy.
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)
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When was that? You can still run from a single floppy https://github.com/Steve3184/floppinux and some form of that was available for ages.
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Did I just wake up from a coma? QNX desktop? Wayland XFCE? What is going on here
Seems like QNX was hiding in plain sight as a car os and a mission critical os for other devices.
I wish we could get it's competitor TronOS to make a similar desktop version --- the demo of it displaying multiple video windows on an 80186 was jaw-dropping --- a shame the U.S. Trade Commission quashed Japan's Ministry of Education's plans to roll it out nation-wide in schools from elementary up through graduate.
There are tons of proprietary RTOS/microkernel products on the market. It's not so much hiding as it is crowded-out.
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We're definitely a secret ingredient brand... hiding in products you use every day!
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Blackberry OS 10 was also running QNX under the hook afaik.
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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.
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Just like MINIX!
I feel like Charlie Brown running up to kick the football and having Lucy pull it away.
And,
Bring back Photon. It was dang near perfect.
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.
[1] https://qnx.software/en/developers/get-started/getting-start...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/11/qnx_8_freeware/
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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.
> One of my favourite GUIs, closely tied with CDE.
In case you're not aware: CDE is still around, open source, and runs on modern unix-likes.
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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.
Tehnically, BB10 could run iOS apps at the beginning but, they disabled it before the release of PlayBook. Bad call.
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.
.NET is doing pretty good without all cross platform UI.
QNX was my operating system from 1985 to 1988. I also studied it in 2000 for a project that ended up getting cancelled.
Initially the actual implementation didn't match the conceptual framework, but by version 1.2 they had really cleaned things up.
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.
> Blackbberry 10 was an amazing mobile OS.
100% this. I had a Passport and it was one of the single lovelist phones I've ever had.
Compared to my Nokia 7710, the last device with the original Psion UI... that was an elegant touchscreen, plus physical buttons, and a replaceable battery, but that was about it.
Compared to my Nokia E90 Communicator...
The keyboard was even better; it charged off a standard MicroUSB port, and had a standard headphone jack; it had way more apps, because it ran Android ones pretty well.
Compared to any Android phone... Vastly unrecognisably better messaging app, with one inbox for all messages and notifications. Square screen so no fighting portrait vs. landscape. Physical keyboard for much more accurate typing -- and scrolling. Google-free.
> I had a Passport and it was one of the single lovelist phones I've ever had.
I would still love one, but I don't think I could move it to my own Blackberry account at this point in time.
QNX is owned by Blackberry?! Blackberry still exists?
$100M+ last quarter, split between QNX and endpoint device software, https://www.panabee.com/news/blackberry-earnings-q3-2025
275M cars with QNX, https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2025/12/19/blackberry-...
AI/robotics, https://qnx.software/en/industries/robotics
Exactly. And there’s a huge community of the old Blackberry qnx device owners as well still trying to survive.
"Hey! I’ve seen this one, this is a classic!" <Marty McFly pointing at screen>
QNX will shift focus in a year or two.
If you want to fall for the QNX bait and switch a 3rd time, more fool you.
Can you elaborate on this?
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.
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They don't promise anything "Open Source" here.
The bait and switch was around the “free” license for non-commercial use. They got lots of people using it and porting software to it, and then they revoked that free license.
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.
I totally understand that due diligence can feel overwhelming, especially when evaluating digital assets. In my experience, taking a structured approach helps, like breaking down financials, traffic data, and market potential. I've been using a free tool called DREA (Digital Real Estate Analyzer) for some of my evaluations, and it’s really streamlined the process for me. It might be worth checking out to help simplify your analysis!
Oddly Swift appears to support QNX but there’s not much information about it.
https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-testing/issues/868
Does this mean QNX supports at least some of the Apple software?
Not at all. Swift is just a programming language.
Hard to say. May be related to CarPlay.
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.
And stopped.
QNX is running on bare metal in a lot of cars.
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.
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Bare metal! So, if you just give it enough time, it will run on Rust?
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QT is supported too, and actually upstream!
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.
Bare metal is on the short-term roadmap!
which 'gaming' distro is that out of curiousity?
CachyOS.
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)
Wow so they have a desktop version again after many many years. That's huge.
I wish someone would reimplement/clone Photon Micro GUI it was amazing.
This is so 90's. Now, if something isn't using 500 MB of RAM and 50 libraries, it is not worth using it.
Wow, this could be quite useful for poking at the head unit in my car. It's also running QNX.
I hope you don’t end up diagnosing issues on the highway.
PREEMPT_RT, Toyota's IVI shell for flutter and the AGL efforts has made qnx compete again
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.
Toyota has adopted the flutter IVI shell in their newer cars. You could argue that it can also run on QNX but the real push behind it has been the growing interest and effort behind AGL.
QNX hypervisor architecture allows companies to adopt AGL gradually bringing in the productivity benefits of stuff like flutter and Linux. QT is hell, their entire moat has been the automotive industry/highly embedded devices and seeing Flutter chip away at even a small portion of it gives a lot of hope for a better competitive landscape for more productive and performant embedded guis.
Supposedly QNX is used by many car infotainment systems. A hard realtime OS for infotainment? What is the purpose? There are costs associated with using something like QNX. I can understand if you needed to control drivetain with it, but for infotainment why not just use Linux?
Infotainment controls many of car systems. For example, infotainment controls car drive mode, which instantly affects gearbox. Probably requires predictable time delays for certification.
No gpl, and more importantly the gpl 'fans' who can't write a line of code but will scream about gpl violations if they can find anything - even if false.
it run qt and does everything else so it is often an easy choice.
In some cases it could also be an Android guest running as a VM on the QNX Hypervisor, where there are multiple guests (QNX, Android, Linux) making use of the same HW.
fast boot, low latency for buttons/controls.
I have a Ford Sync 2.5 system which is a cost reduced hardware downgrade from QNX based Sync 3. I'm sure the OS is doing its best while hobbled by a poor management decision but it has lots of bugs that crop up from what appears to be severe RAM shortage coupled with some gradual memory leaks. I have to reboot it regularly when traveling with Android auto. It's always a crap shoot if my phone will connect.
Why would I run QNX on the desktop instead of say Linux or FreeBSD?
QNX is not a GPOS, so you wouldn't. I mean you _could_, but the real benefit here is hidden within: with the toolchain now included in this image, folks working on QNX projects can now build them right on target. No more messy cross-compilation.
Is GTK their go to GUI toolkit nowadays? (mentioned in the examples)
GTK support for sure, but also Qt, Godot, and others. Commercially, also support for Unity & Unreal.
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?
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.
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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.
>IPC including network transparency
Sadly not anymore, Qnet was removed in 8.0
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A bit dissapointed by this. You have to create an account, get a license, deploy it and then you get a fucking download manager just for linux and windows to download who knows what that should run on qemu. Why not just give a link to a qemu image with a script that runs it?
We plan to host prebuilts in the new year to make it easier to download/run.
Yes!
In an era where most development-oriented software is downloaded with wget/git clone/[package manager] install, this whole process feels like a slap in the face. And don't get me wrong, this is still a huge upgrade over the InstallShield Wizard of the previous versions, which rarely worked at all, and if it did, it would butcher your /etc/profile, but its still an absolute abomination, bundling an entire JRE for the only rightful architecture x86-64 just to download and unzip a few files.
And the official support options are Discord and Reddit. Sad.
Since when does xfce run on Wayland?
Since openSUSE Leap 16 a third of a year ago. I gave it a mini-review:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/07/opensuse_leap_16_reac...
Xfce uses labwc. It works very well although standard window-management keystrokes don't work. Apart from that, which is a bit of a deal-breaker for me, it's almost indistinguishable.
What compositor is being used?
Hiya! It's Weston. Here's the port: https://github.com/qnx-ports/build-files/tree/main/ports/wes...
Thank you!
Totally miss this.
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Marketing looks nice, but why do they make it so hard to build trust? If it's a software focused on developers it's really important to establish trust.
The page on https://devblog.qnx.com/about/ does not show what kind of company it is, who is behind it, and where they are located. Should I expect backdoors? Is it an elaborate front by north korea? Who will be able to remotely execute code on this operating system?
It's nearly 2026 and fake job applications by nation-state threat actors are common. If a new open source project with shiny marketing pops up it would really help if there is some proof that the org behind it consists of humans living in democratic countries.
Edit: The about page links to https://qnx.software/en which only shows a black screen for me.
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.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/markets/stocks/BB-...
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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX
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.
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> black screen
Try disabling content/ad blockers.
Thanks, you're correct. The cookie banner script at [1] was blocked and somehow it crashes the whole site. I only see the black background.
[1] https://qnx.software/scripts/global/cookie-consent.js
> Should I expect backdoors? Is it an elaborate front by north korea? Who will be able to remotely execute code on this operating system?
Stop sowing FUD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
You should "trust, but verify" and not shoot the messenger. If raising valid concerns that were not addressed by the linked website is FUD for you, so be it. Sourceforge was also a major brand back in the day and nowadays it raises an anti virus alarm if a user visits that website.
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