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QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop

devblog.qnx.com

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Re: QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop

#21

Post by Animats »

wowczarek wrote: post #7
donatj wrote: post #6

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/

Re: QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop

#22

Post by bflesch »

ronsor wrote: post #18
bflesch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's developed by BlackBerry, is it not? Has been for years now.

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.

Re: QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop

#23

Post by tombert »

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?

Re: QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop

#24

Post by jonhohle »

wowczarek wrote: post #7
donatj wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop

#25

Post by cbsks »

wmf wrote: post #8
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #3

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…

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.

Re: QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop

#26

Post by transpute »

bflesch wrote: post #22
ronsor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's developed by BlackBerry, is it not? Has been for years now.

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.

From the Wikipedia page

  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.

Re: QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop

#27

Post by xvilka »

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...

Re: QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop

#28

Post by xvilka »

speed_spread wrote: post #20
wmf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QNX is running on bare metal in a lot of cars.

Bare metal! So, if you just give it enough time, it will run on Rust?

Only if it's exposed to elements. Meanwhile Rust already works on QNX[1][2].

[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...

Re: QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop

#29

Post by shakna »

bflesch wrote: post #17
wmf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The page certainly isn't black for me. Its QNX's usual marketing fluff about being embedded in a wide range of cars.

Re: QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop

#30

Post by xvilka »

Animats wrote: post #21
wowczarek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

[1] https://doc.redox-os.org/book/microkernels.html

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/real-time-linux-is-o...

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