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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0SP1.update/com.qnx....
[2] https://www.mikecramer.com/qnx/momentics_nc_docs/photon/prog...
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.
I'd agree using qnx.software rather than qnx.com is kinda dumb though.
Try disabling content/ad blockers.
[1] https://qnx.software/scripts/global/cookie-consent.js
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-...
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/
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...
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
275M cars with QNX, https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2025/12/19/blackberry-...
AI/robotics, https://qnx.software/en/industries/robotics
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?
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.
[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...