A long, long time ago, back when running BeOS as my main operating system had finally become impossible, I had a short stint running QNX as my one and only operating system. In 2004, before I joined OSNews and became its managing editor, I also wrote and published an article about QNX on OSNews, which is cringe-inducing to read over two decades later (although I was only 20 when I wrote that – I should be kind to my young self). Sadly, the included screenshots have not survived the several transitions OSNews has gone through since 2004.
Anyway, back in those days, it was entirely possible to use QNX as a general purpose desktop operating system, mostly because of two things. First, the incredible Photon MicroGUI, an excellent and unique graphical environment that was a joy to use, and two, because of a small but dedicated community of enthousiasts, some of which QNX employees, who ported a ton of open source applications, from basic open source tools to behemoths like Thunderbird, the Mozilla Suite, and Firefox, to QNX. It even came with an easy-to-use package manager and associated GUI to install all of these applications without much hassle.
Using QNX like this was a joy. It really felt like a tightly controlled, carefully crafted user experience, despite desktop use being so low on the priority list for the company that it might as well have not been on there at all. Not long after, I think a few of the people inside QNX involved with the QNX desktop community left the company, and the entire thing just fizzled out afterwards when the company was acquired by Harman Kardon. Not long after, it became clear the company lost all interest, a feeling only solidified once Blackberry acquired the company. Somewhere in between the company released some of its code under some not-quite-open-source license, accompanied by a rather lacklustre push to get the community interested again. This, too, fizzled out.
Well, it seems the company is trying to reverse course, and has started courting the enthusiast community once again. This time, it’s called QNX Everywhere, and it involves making QNX available for non-commercial use for anyone who wants it. No, it’s not open source, and yes, it requires some hoops to jump through still, but it’s better than nothing. In addition, QNX also put a bunch of open source demos, applications, frameworks, and libraries on GitLab.
One of the most welcome new efforts is a bootable QNX image for the Raspberry Pi 4 (and only the 4, sadly, which I don’t own). It comes with a basic set of demo application you can run from the command line, including a graphical web browser, but sadly, it does not seem to come with Photon microGUI or any modern equivalent. I’m guessing Photon hasn’t seen a ton of work since its golden days two decades ago, which might explain why it’s not here. There’s also a list of current open source ports, which includes chunks of toolkits like GTK and Qt, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Honestly, as cool as this is, it seems it’s mostly aimed at embedded developers instead of weird people who want to use QNX as a general purpose operating system, which makes total sense from QNX’ perspective. I hope Photon microGUI will make a return at some point, and it would be awesome – but I expect unlikely – if QNX could be released as open source, so that it would be more likely a community of enthusiasts could spring up around it. For now, without much for a non-developer like me to do with it, it’s not making me run out to buy a Raspberry Pi 4 just yet.
Photon will not be coming back. The architecture is way too old for the modern world of accelerated graphics. It’s also really hard to port other desktops to QNX, given how much these rely on X, even when they use toolkits such as Qt or GTK (Wayland may make this easier in the future). This is why I wrote ScreenWM for my own use, but it’s available as an open source project here:
https://gitlab.rim.net/elahav/screenwm
Another shameless plug (sorry!) is a short book I wrote to serve as an introduction to QNX, that may answer some questions people may have about the system:
https://gitlab.rim.net/elahav/qnx-rpi-book
Nice internal links.
The problem is that no effort was done to modernize or replace Photon, the response was to kill the desktop entirely. It seems to be a sore spot for QNX employees whenever it is mentioned. For many hobbyists, it was their first impression of QNX.
Hi Elahav,
I think those links will not work outside your corporate network.
Well, that’s embarrassing. I pasted the wrong ones.
https://gitlab.com/elahav/screenwm
https://gitlab.com/elahav/qnx-rpi-book
Not only do I fondly remember Photon, but I also remember Thom’s article. That was back when Eugenia was editing or maybe even before, and OSNews was part of my daily reading along with, like, Fark and BBSpot. I remember tinkering with QNX around the time I was tinkering with different Gnome 2 releases like Ximian and Dropline.
It’d be a shame if Photon didn’t come back somehow, since even though it was (apparently) put together by only a few dedicated programmers it was a stylish and well-designed DE.
“Sadly, the included screenshots have not survived the several transitions OSNews has gone through since 2004.”
The Wayback Machine still has them archived:
https://web.archive.org/web/20041204105526/http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=8911
Where have I heard that before.. QNX is noncommittal, and has no interest in the hobbyist community.
https://www.osnews.com/story/23565/qnx6-is-closed-source-once-again/
I actually used the QNX 1.44MB demo floppy. Was lucky to have a supported 3com nic. Mind blowing stuff then, and still is.
I also ran Photon on something once upon a time.
Would love to see if QNX could be ported to other SBCs or tvboxes (an armbian alternative)
oooo pi5 support also coming soon
ARM Broadcom raspberrypi.org Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Cortex A72 QNX SDP 8.0 BSP for Raspberry Pi BCM2711 R-PI4 QNX 8.0 QNX Software Center
ARM Broadcom raspberrypi.org Raspberry Pi 5 Cortex A76 Coming Soon !! QNX 8.0 Contact QNX
ARM Broadcom raspberrypi.org Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Cortex A72 QNX SDP 7.1 BSP for Raspberry Pi4 (raspberrypi-bcm2711-rpi4) QNX 7.1 QNX Software Center
“Using QNX like this was a joy. It really felt like a tightly controlled, carefully crafted user experience, despite desktop use being so low on the priority list for the company that it might as well have not been on there at all.”
I have no recollection of QNX as a user but many of the things that Thom misses from it are offered in modern form by Sculpt OS from Genode.
Technically interesting system? Check.
Desktop distro being non-core to ambitions of company itself (making it free from commercial expectations and able to experiment)? Check.
Tightly controlled, carefully crafted user experience? The clue is in the name. Check.
It is of course a real shame that QNX was not to become a mobile phone system we all use today (along with Windows Phone).
Many years ago I won a copy of QNX, I should certainly still have the CD somewhere. It was a great OS, Very snappy and looked good. I would be surprised if there isn’t a Linux desktop that copied the style.
QNX was quite the marvel decades ago when it was easily “available”.
But QNX wanted us all to use something else. Message received (pun).