Posted by transpute 12/27/2025
QNX will shift focus in a year or two.
On at least one occasion, the license was changed overnight leaving a large enthusiast community in the lurch.
Given the history, there's every reason to suspect that there'll be yet more rug-pulls in the future.
Then they did exactly the same thing again a few years later.
And now, for the 3rd time, they are offering a “free” non-commercial license.
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.
I'm also very well served by some 'gaming distro', where nothing ever stutters or lags, on almost obsolete hardware, mostly clocked down to 800Mhz, with uptimes of up to 150 days. More isn't really useful anyways, because of updates.
But hey, Wayland! On QNX! With XFCE on top of that! Who would have thought?
What about photonic Plasma instead of some Generic ToolKit?
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.
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.
And stopped.
The latter is actually a common setup, used by Mercedes-Benz and Hangsheng if I'm not mistaken.
[1] https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/8.0/com.qnx.doc.neutrino...
[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/nto-qnx.htm...
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.
Running on Core i5 7500t and Core i7 7700t with integrated intel HD630 graphics on Lenovo M910q tiny with 32GB RAM. Mostly clocked down to 800Mhz. Chosen path: systemd-boot, Btrfs, ZRAM, Plasma/KDE.
Edit:
I'm also not gaming btw, just heavy browser use, and some LibreOffice. So if you expect to get insane FPS in 4K(on old systems!), that probably wouldn't work. What does work is having (a heavily customized) FF working with uBo with usually 4 FF-windows open, and each of them at least several dozen tabs, almost always one of them playing some music from YT without a hitch. Doing other stuff on other virtual desktops (I run 3 by 3). 4K videos with mpv no problem. With VLC neither, but I deinstalled that because I don't need so much UI and features. Matter of taste. Shrug. Remoting by whichever means. Even experimenting with small local LLMs like Deepseek R1:8B via Ollama. Though that brings the systems to their limits, spinning up the fan hard, and going allcore 3.1GHz :-)
Feels like BBSsing in the days of analog modems :-)
(Because 'thinking' for minutes, and answers trickle in like text at 300 to 1200 baud, or so)
But still, while doing so, music from YT doodling on, even whith EasyEffects, no scratches, klicks, distortions, whatever.
System stays responsive, no matter if I'm shuffling files in Dolphin/Krusader, torturing LibreOffice Calc, reading some website, PDF, downloading something, be it via browser/Kget or Ktorrent, remote desking, conferencing...
It's all just flowing very smoothly.
Bliss.
Because it just works.
(On my hardware, which may change if you have to use other drivers for AMD, Nvidia, or later intel graphics. Or your firmware/UEFI is buggy/broken.)
Editoftheedit:
Oh! Did I mention suspend to RAM and wakeup is working perfectly? Every single time! The same goes for Wake on LAN, or netbooting.
(cackling madly)
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.
QNX hypervisor architecture allows companies to adopt AGL gradually bringing in the productivity benefits of stuff like flutter and Linux. QT is hell, their entire moat has been the automotive industry/highly embedded devices and seeing Flutter chip away at even a small portion of it gives a lot of hope for a better competitive landscape for more productive and performant embedded guis.
it run qt and does everything else so it is often an easy choice.