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.
In case you're not aware: CDE is still around, open source, and runs on modern unix-likes.
"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...
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 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?
LargoLasskhyfv•2h ago
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?
yjftsjthsd-h•2h ago
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.
wmf•1h ago
speed_spread•39m ago
cbsks•12m ago
fud101•54m ago