141–150 of 174 posts
Why would I run QNX on the desktop instead of say Linux or FreeBSD?
If you want to fall for the QNX bait and switch a 3rd time, more fool you.
They don't promise anything "Open Source" here.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
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.
They were also early adopters of Eclipse, which was the "default IDE" before the advent of VS Code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yep. QNX was better than anything else around 2000. VxWorks was technically slimmer and more reliable, but QNX had a real mostly-POSIX-compatible environment. You could develop/debug the code on QNX itself and deploy it on the devices. They were also early adopters of Eclipse, which was the "default IDE" before the advent of VS Code.
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 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/