A few years ago, I was an avid QNX user. I used the non-commercial desktop version of this wonderfully clean and elegant pure-microkernel operating system for a long period of time, as a desktop operating system. I liked the whole style of this operating system, its Photon user interface, and its excellent package management system. I even wrote a three-page article about it. Sadly, QSS, the company behind QNX, lost all interest in the non-commercial desktop version, and ditched it, leaving only a hard-to-find 30-day evaluation version alive. Community interest dwindled, and so did mine. Despite my lost interest, it saddened me today to learn that QNXZone.com, a community portal for QNX, has been shut down. Read on for a few short thoughts.
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Member since:2005-06-29
You have no idea how true that is -- or for how long it's been true.
I installed QNX 6.3.0 today, and updated it to 6.3.2a. It's still great stuff, and recently, all the latest Mozilla packages have been ported to it too. It's still a joy to use, despite the fact its performance obviously isn't optimised for this kind of computing.
QNX is how I see my ideal operating system: completely modular.The entire OS is built as a microkernel, including the Photon graphical user interface. Sure, this means a performance penalty, but you get so much in return (stability, clean design, you name it).
The current situation is a shame, but hey, it is the way it is. People parrot Linus Torvalds in his anti-muK attitude, but people fail to realise that Linus actually has an agenda (hint: he needs to sell a monolithic kernel). On top of that, QNX/Harman does what is best for their company (logically!) and a desktop version of QNX doesn't fit in.
Sad, but hey.
Member since:
2005-09-16
Thom, you wrote:
It is sad that an operating system with such potential is held back by its parent company.
You have no idea how true that is -- or for how long it's been true. As an undergraduate, I became enamored with QNX's architecture, and I went to work for QSSL for two subsequent summers. I loved the operating system, and I loved working on it. In particular, the second summer I was there (summer of 1995), SMP boards were starting to become mainstream, so I brought QNX 4 up on SMP by running a separate copy of the operating system on each CPU, writing a little fake-o networking layer to string them together, and then let QNX's elegant distributed system primitives do the rest. It was really very cool -- and a great tribute to the architecture of QNX. And even though it could have shipped with a small amount of additional effort, QSSL didn't ship it because it would have harmed a partner that was selling multiboard computers. And this to me has always been QNX in a nutshell: great technology, but so hell-bent on playing small ball that it never really amounted to much. Most people have no idea what a great operating system QNX is/was -- it is the ultimate counter-argument to Torvalds' ill-informed and dogmatic position on microkernels -- but most people never will have any idea because it has been restrained to the point of irrelevance.
I will always be grateful to Dan and Gord for giving me my first really interesting technical work -- and I still very much miss Dan Hildebrand (who was responsible for giving me that opportunity and who passed away in 1998) -- but I have never regretted my decision to come to Sun in 1996 instead of QSSL. Sun has plenty of faults, but not being sufficiently aggressive with great technology doesn't tend to be one of them.