161–170 of 174 posts
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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.
So it's an elaborate front by South Korea instead.
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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.
> If raising valid concerns that were not addressed by the linked website is FUD for you, so be it. Yes, it is. It's specifically called concern trolling: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/concern_troll In this case it's because the mass-market operating systems with which QNX could compete already do the things you're “concerned” about. QNX could only be an improvement in that regard.
As someone who has not worked in automotive QNX is a totally unknown brand and based on the linked website I had trouble finding out what it actually is. Also the wikipedia source just stated RIM and might not have been updated at all. Also RIM/Blackberry is not a brand that is positively recognized.
With something like Ubuntu it was an easy, verifiable story who is behind it and what they are doing. That's what the linkd QNX page was missing, and I pointed it out because I actually tried to do the due diligence and see what company is behind it and where it is located.
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I thought that QNX was acquired by / is still developed by BlackBerry?
Seems you are right. See how complicated it is? :)
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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…
Is this true? [0] No CVEs since 2011? [0] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-436/...
The reduction in scope is really gold, it makes it so much easier just to have a small defined interface per program. It is a bit like Erlang/OTP but with C as the core language, the IPC is so lightweight that it becomes the driver behind all library level isolation. So what in a macrokernel would be a massive monolith with all manner of stuff in the same execution ring turns into a miniscule kernel that just does IPC and scheduling and everything else is a user process, including all of the luxuries that you normally associate with user processes: dumps, debuggers, consoles.
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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…
Bare metal is on the short-term roadmap!
I am a little confused about it both being a virtual image running on QEMU and requiring a very specific Ubuntu version as the base OS.
Shouldn't anything that can run QEMU work?
I used to do software development back on 386 with the OS on a floppy disk and really loved it. In fact, I ported my Objective-C compiler and runtime to QNX back then. Would love to play around with it on my Mac.
Thanks!
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> 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.
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. [1] https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3 [2] https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
> that doesn't require long time abandoned C code
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
Not so Common Desktop Environment (NsCDE) 2.3 Latest
on Jun 16, 2023
https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/files/
src 2025-11-25
CDE is still in active development. NsCDE is effectively abandoned.
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.
Since when does xfce run on Wayland?
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.
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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.
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…
I wasn’t claiming Linux couldn’t achieve this, merely stating why QNX was mind blowing: because it was way ahead of what was available, not what was possible.
Congrats on your live floppy project, I guess.
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…
I would still love one, but I don't think I could move it to my own Blackberry account at this point in time.