Way back in the day, back when I wasn’t even working at OSNews yet, I used to run QNX as my desktop operating system, together with a small number of other enthusiasts. It was a struggle, for sure, but it was fun, exciting, and nobody else was crazy enough to do so. Sadly, the small QNX desktop community wasn’t even remotely interesting to QNX, and later Blackberry when they acquired the company, and eventually the stand-alone Neutrino-powered version of QNX disappeared behind confusing signup screens and other dark patterns. It meant the end of our small little community.
Much to my utter surprise and delight, I saw a post by js about how he ported GCC 10 to QNX – in this case, to QNX 6.5 SP1, released in 2012 – and submitted it to pkgsrc. His ultimate goal is to port one of his other projects, ObjFW, to QNX. He makes use of pkgsrc to do this kind of work, which also means he had to make pkgsrc bootstrap and a lot of other software work on QNX.
We’re at QNX 8.0 by now, and as much as I bang my head against QNX and BlackBerry’s wall of marketing and corporate speak, I just can’t find out if it’s even still possible to download QNX Neutrino and install it on real generic hardware today.
I too loved neutrino and qnx.
I was a huge fan of the QNX desktop, I thought it would be the next big niche OS after BeOS died. My old BeOS rig happened to have 100% working hardware under QNX as well, and like you Thom, I ran it as my main OS for a long time. I eventually had to give it up when that PC died (the Great Capacitor Plague of the early 2000s was horrendous) and I moved on to Slackware Linux as my main desktop OS.
I drag out my PCem image of QNX every now and then for a nostalgia hit, but as with most emulation it’s just not the same as running it on real hardware.
QNX was awesome. 🙂
It’s too bad I have to speak to a regional sales rep to get pricing. Beyond that, they’re probably not interested in selling me like 5 licenses at a reasonable price (<=$25) per license. LOL
I miss BlackBerry 10 too. It’s a shame how the potential of QNX was squandered, twice.
Agreed, I had a BB Passport for a while and the only reason I stopped using it was because of an inevitable hardware design flaw. The device was nearly as wide as it was tall, and because I carried it in my pocket it ended up bending and flexing to the point the screen began to separate from the frame. I greatly miss the UI and the OS in general though; it was far superior to even my favorite mobile interface, Windows Phone 8, and it could run most Android apps so there wasn’t an app shortage like Windows Phone had.
@Thom you can still run QNX on desktop. The “SDP 8.0” package has a 30 day trial and images for generic x86.
https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/developers/board-support-packages
https://www.qnx.com/products/evaluation/
There is also a non-commercial licence, though frankly finding it is really, really hard. Also note that the BSP doesn’t give you a desktop – it’s the bare-bones build file and drivers to get you started with creating your own image, and is targeted at companies creating embedded systems with QNX, not end users.
I’ve been running my own QNX desktop for a few years now and you can find the source code through this link: https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2020/09/10/screenwm-source-code/
There are also a couple of other QNX 8-based projects there, like a RaspberryPi-powered treadmill:
https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2023/01/25/raspberry-pi-powered-treadmill/