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/

> 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...

> And with real time patches merged into Linux mainline[2] QNX doesn't stand much chance today too.

Correct me if I'm wrong but these and other Linux patches were always about soft real time and Linux never had hard real time capability because of its architecture.

You are absolutely right. For most applications it's good enough though, unless regulatorily enforced.

> QNX should be licensed like Unreal Engine.

That sounds quite a bit harder to enforce for an OS designed to run inside, often not internet-connected, devices.

If someone would decide to run QNX (or whatever) inside, often not internet-connected, devices then some IP enforcement wouldn't stop them anyway.

I mean it’s a realtime OS. It’s designed for that. So the pricing model has to work with that.

Bare metal is on the short-term roadmap!

Cool!

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!

> 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

Eh, there's always https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback for that.

Sorry, but this line is wildly inaccurate:

> 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.

> In case you're not aware: CDE is still around, open source, and runs on modern unix-likes

Oh I'm aware :) also this beauty from SGI is now around again:

https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/

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.