I hear tons of praise for QNX here, but how many people have had good experience with it? I've absolutely hated VxWorks personally, and have heard many complaints about QNX as well.

Has anyone here used it and liked it more than, e.g. Linux?

I have used it, and for what it is I like it rather well. If I was in the business of building real-time systems, I would choose it over Linux in a heartbeat.

At the time I learned C on it Minix was brand new and Linux was a distant future. QNX is a rock-solid RTOS. There was, once, a desktop version with a GUI, but I never used it.

I may be wrong, but I remember it could boot, compile C code and run vi from a 360k floppy.