Announced earlier in December but flying under the radar until now is the initial reoease of a QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop. This is a developer environment for the QNX real-time operating system primarily used on embedded systems. With now having this developer desktop option, the hassle of cross-compilation to target QNX can be avoided.

The debut QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop gets a full desktop environment running atop QNX 8.0 to focus on self-hosted QNX development. This does work with the QNX free personal license for non-commercial use for hobbyists, students, and industry professionals interested in non-commercial QNX use.

Atop QNX 8.0 is an Xfce desktop environment running atop Wayland. The default compiler toolchains consists of both GCC and LLVM/Clang plus having Python and other standard build utilities available. IDE / code editors like Emacs, Geany, Neovim, and others are available.

At this stage the QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop is distributed as a QEMU usage and has been tested as running as a virtual machine atop Ubuntu Linux. With focused on running as a VM avoids the issue of QNX not typically supporting limited hardware outside of the embedded space. QNX is also going to explore a native image for Raspberry Pi hardware.

Those wanting to learn more about this QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop can do so via the QNX blog.