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QNX give update of new Amiga OS and GUI

g.macdonald wrote in to send us news of the new Amiga GUI based on QNX. It looks very perty. How long before we have a GNOME and Enlightenment theme that mimics it.

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  1. So what exactly are we getting? by Tiger · · Score: 5

    So what exactly are we getting?

    That whole thing sounded like a sales pitch for QNX and their windowing stitch-on, Photon.

    Gods, I have such a love-hate relationship with QNX. I think it'll make an amazing foundation to a new OS, but on the other hand I've developed under QNX for the last year and I hate it - it's a RTOS and gods help you if you aren't writing a specialised realtime app for thousands of installations. And I don't see much in that press release telling you what you get that you can't already have:

    - QNX OS foundation - The QNX OS is already available for the x86. (A license'll cost you, at last check, $1K+ cdn unless you can get major volume discounts. A new pricing structure, actually, and the straw that broke our little software house's back and is pushing us to a free, full-featured OS that starts with an 'L')

    - Photon Micro-GUI - I've never used their Photon. We have no licenses for it. QNX likes licenses. (Did you know that QNX requires a separate license for their TCP/IP package?) Oh, but Photon does already exist anyway.

    - x86 architecture. So we're using the same machine guts too.

    What Amiga? where? Is this going to be QNX on x86 with a slightly enhanced GUI with its own look-and-feel - and the Amiga label.

    Another thought. QNX charges big bucks for their OS. More big bucks for development licenses. A new Amiga is going to be a consumer machine, right? So if this wonderful new OS /is/ different, and /is/ built on top of the QNX OS, what the heck are they going to rip out to justify charging consumer OS prices for Amiga and industry OS prices for their existing clients?

    Of course, I may just be ranting, after spending another month working on a minor release number on QNX rather than the next major release on Linux. So take what I say with a grain of salt.

    --Tiger