I was expecting to see that, I ended up looking up some old LiteStep themes [1][2] for my fix

[1] https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/6/

[2] https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/292/

Indeed. QNX is the coolest OS I ever seen and Photon felt the coolest desktop environment. Although I like XFCE in the Linux context (more than e.g. GNOME), I am sad to see it replaced Photon on QNX. Photon just looked and felt so lovely and came with a visual C++ builder making GUI apps development so nice.

> I understand why they dropped [Photon] in favor of Qt and later Web technologies

The arrows of time branch and spiral, so it's possible that "later" could require some properties of "earlier".

If Photon could not be open-sourced, it could be licensed to a third party for custodian maintenance. If QNX is abandoning Photon forever, would Blackberry object to Photon being cloned for Linux or FreeBSD? That could preserve a future option for QNX to use it again, like XFCE.

Enthusiasts still use Blackberry keyboards on handheld devices in 2025, which sell out in minutes. In a parallel universe, Blackberry.com offers embedded SBC developers self-service purchase and global delivery of the legendary Blackberry keyboard, with Bluetooth for convenience or USB-c for security.

Yes while it makes sense to reuse stuff that is already being built, my heart sank when I saw the screenshot while expecting seeing the photon microgui which to me was the nicest skeuomorphic one.

Funny thing is this got brought up to us in other circles. As a relatively new person to QNX photon seems to have a special place in people's hearts

I still see it used in manufacturing.

We still do that! In fact, the _QNX From The Board Up_ series on the developer blog is a small rip from that training content, adapted by Mr Brown. I hope we'll get all of it out there for everyone to benefit from in 2026 :)

Sometimes I wish I could do this for mid career sabbatical.

It was mind blowing at the time because Linux required at least 4-5 floppies to set up a text-only base system while QNX ran live from just a single 1.44MB.

Seems like QNX was hiding in plain sight as a car os and a mission critical os for other devices.

And,

    BARTLET
    By the way, the words you are looking for are, "Oh, good grief!"

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.

> QNX can run Swift code makes me think of it could also run iPhone apps.

Not at all. That is like saying because it can run C, it can run windows apps. To run iPhone apps you would need all the libraries and runtimes ported, including the whole GUI. Just not happening.

Swift is probably less than 1% of the what it takes to run iPhone apps, you can get Swift for Windows too, but it is nowhere near able to run iPhone apps. The problem is all the libraries an iPhone app expects to be available on the host OS, all the multimedia stuff and so on, those libraries on iPhone are large and advanced, and not available for porting to any OS outside of Apple.

Swift != SwiftUI. You need the latter to run modern iOS apps written in Swift.

It's great that Apple are pushing Swift out there a bit, but honestly if they want the World to catch fire with it, they need to give away the Crown Jewels and get SwiftUI out there as well.

Meanwhile, it's great that QNX is supporting modern languages. I can imagine having a bit of fun with this developer desktop and seeing how modern tooling plays nicely with it.

> Blackbberry 10 was an amazing mobile OS.

100% this. I had a Passport and it was one of the single lovelist phones I've ever had.

Compared to my Nokia 7710, the last device with the original Psion UI... that was an elegant touchscreen, plus physical buttons, and a replaceable battery, but that was about it.

Compared to my Nokia E90 Communicator...

The keyboard was even better; it charged off a standard MicroUSB port, and had a standard headphone jack; it had way more apps, because it ran Android ones pretty well.

Compared to any Android phone... Vastly unrecognisably better messaging app, with one inbox for all messages and notifications. Square screen so no fighting portrait vs. landscape. Physical keyboard for much more accurate typing -- and scrolling. Google-free.

$100M+ last quarter, split between QNX and endpoint device software, https://www.panabee.com/news/blackberry-earnings-q3-2025

275M cars with QNX, https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2025/12/19/blackberry-...

AI/robotics, https://qnx.software/en/industries/robotics

Can you elaborate on this?

They don't promise anything "Open Source" here.

Does this mean QNX supports at least some of the Apple software?

> We'll see if it reaches bare metal some time, instead of relying on QEMU(on Ubuntu).

They do list "A native Desktop image on Raspberry Pi" under What's Next, so hopefully soon:)

> 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.

Yeah, that gives me pause too. There was some noise earlier about open sourcing it; I do wish they'd actually do that.

> We'll see if it reaches bare metal some time, instead of relying on QEMU

You can already get a free license for QNX and grab a BSP (board support package) to create a bare metal image. You have been able to for quite a while. People who understand how a computer works, what a device driver is and how and when to use one, are not the target for this demo. It's targeted at the people who think the user interface is the software and the desktop GUI is the operating system.

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

QT is supported too, and actually upstream!

https://hackaday.com/2017/05/03/your-next-desktop-qnx/

Granted, this is not the full Plasma shell, but you can run a lot of KDE software on it just fine.

Bare metal is on the short-term roadmap!

which 'gaming' distro is that out of curiousity?

This is so 90's. Now, if something isn't using 500 MB of RAM and 50 libraries, it is not worth using it.

I hope you don’t end up diagnosing issues on the highway.

It's not a hard-running race. PREEMPT_RT is soft realtime and if you rely on it for your brakes you're going to crash. AGL has not yet produced any kind of usable system that can be certified for functional safety under ISO 26262 or IEC 61508. Just a core kernel with no drivers.

We run into a lot of OEMs who switch to Linux because of AGL and come crawling back to QNX many expensive months later to start over with a viable solution so they can deliver.

Infotainment controls many of car systems. For example, infotainment controls car drive mode, which instantly affects gearbox. Probably requires predictable time delays for certification.

No gpl, and more importantly the gpl 'fans' who can't write a line of code but will scream about gpl violations if they can find anything - even if false.

it run qt and does everything else so it is often an easy choice.

In some cases it could also be an Android guest running as a VM on the QNX Hypervisor, where there are multiple guests (QNX, Android, Linux) making use of the same HW.

fast boot, low latency for buttons/controls.

QNX is not a GPOS, so you wouldn't. I mean you _could_, but the real benefit here is hidden within: with the toolchain now included in this image, folks working on QNX projects can now build them right on target. No more messy cross-compilation.

GTK support for sure, but also Qt, Godot, and others. Commercially, also support for Unity & Unreal.

QNX is hard realtime. At one point, its kernel had O(1) guarantees for message passing and process switching. It could have been rewritten without any loops. I'm not sure if that's still true.

It's also really compact. This used to be a great selling point for underpowered car infotainment systems. Some cars had around 1Mb of RAM for their infotainment, yet they were able to run fairly complex media systems.

QNX is also used for non-UI components, just as a good realtime OS.

Hard real time (so latency guarantees), microkernel (and they actually mean it, so your device drivers can't hose your system), standardized networked IPC including network transparency for all services, ISRs at the application level.

We plan to host prebuilts in the new year to make it easier to download/run.

Yes!

In an era where most development-oriented software is downloaded with wget/git clone/[package manager] install, this whole process feels like a slap in the face. And don't get me wrong, this is still a huge upgrade over the InstallShield Wizard of the previous versions, which rarely worked at all, and if it did, it would butcher your /etc/profile, but its still an absolute abomination, bundling an entire JRE for the only rightful architecture x86-64 just to download and unzip a few files.

And the official support options are Discord and Reddit. Sad.

Since openSUSE Leap 16 a third of a year ago. I gave it a mini-review:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/07/opensuse_leap_16_reac...

Xfce uses labwc. It works very well although standard window-management keystrokes don't work. Apart from that, which is a bit of a deal-breaker for me, it's almost indistinguishable.

Hiya! It's Weston. Here's the port: https://github.com/qnx-ports/build-files/tree/main/ports/wes...

QNX is the backbone of the auto industry, and powers over 200 million cars on the road. For the target demographic, I don't imagine they need to "build trust" any more than IBM or Microsoft need to build trust.

That said, like IBM and Microsoft, they've also been on and off over the years about whether tinkerers, desktop, and other uses are welcome. So they probably could benefit from showing that this time they're opening the ecosystem for the long haul.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/markets/stocks/BB-...

People in the industry would know that QNX has been around since the 90s (or 80s?) as a very solid embedded GUI platform. They're a company that doesn't need to prove their credentials.

I'd agree using qnx.software rather than qnx.com is kinda dumb though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX

> black screen

Try disabling content/ad blockers.

> Should I expect backdoors? Is it an elaborate front by north korea? Who will be able to remotely execute code on this operating system?

Stop sowing FUD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt