QNX Photon microGUI
Hacker ApprovedGUI windowing system in Developer tools
People recommend Photon as a lightweight, responsive GUI with a well-liked look, and see it as the best part of QNX.
19 people recommended QNX Photon microGUI in Hacker News comments, 1 had mixed feelings and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026.
Summary written by Claude from the comments below.
21 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 19
- mixed feelings
- 1
- warn against or regret it
- 1
The record
Recommended in 7 of 12 months
In 12 different threads.
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
Why it carries the badge
- 19 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 19 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 12 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
- Recommended in 12 threadsNeeds 5 or more, met.
- The biggest thread supplies 42% of its recommendersNeeds half or less, met.
The same rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. Mixed feelings count toward neither side. How the badge works
What people say about it
Reasons grouped from a sample of 20 of the 23 opinions about it, picked in proportion to how many people recommend it, have mixed feelings and criticize it. Each mark is one comment in the sample. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Lovely look and feel
“Photon just looked and felt so lovely and came with a visual C++ builder making GUI apps development so nice.”
Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop” “photon seems to have a special place in people's hearts”
Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop” “One of my favourite GUIs, closely tied with CDE.”
Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop” - Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop”
- Comment from 6 Dec 2025 in “Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop”
- Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop”
Admired as QNX's signature design
“Only things I've seen that achieved something similar were QNX/Photon”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Haiku” “Porting it to the modern QNX and other systems would be great.”
Comment from 24 Jun 2026 in “QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture” “that's half of what made QNX so great back in the day”
Comment from 23 Jun 2026 in “QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture” - Comment from 23 Jun 2026 in “QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture”
Lightweight and responsive multitasking
“blew my mind that you could literally kill and restart Photon without disturbing any of the GUI apps”
Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop” “It was extremely responsive and could multitask without any stuttering”
Comment from 22 Jun 2026 in “An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy” “Very lightweight and fast.”
Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop”
What people said
20 of the 23 opinions about it, picked in proportion to the three counts, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“They also have some secret sauce like Photon (C++ version of the Spark engine”
“nice that they are using photon for their address search”
“one needs many layers (Photon, Pelias with OpenAdresses, Overpass, in-house pmtiles, etc.”
“Porting it to the modern QNX and other systems would be great.”
“I do agree that Photon was great”
“that's half of what made QNX so great back in the day”
“It was extremely responsive and could multitask without any stuttering”
“Using third-party or cloud online services is just pure laziness/convenience”
“Only things I've seen that achieved something similar were QNX/Photon”
“we have an option "Process Control" to blend the RAW and JPEG, bringing some of the noise from the RAW back into the JPEG”
“I'd say it's pretty usable to run a EU-sized country or several US states on any commodity PC.”
“Photon just looked and felt so lovely and came with a visual C++ builder making GUI apps development so nice.”
“photon seems to have a special place in people's hearts”
“which to me was the nicest skeuomorphic one”
“blew my mind that you could literally kill and restart Photon without disturbing any of the GUI apps”
“Very lightweight and fast.”
“One of my favourite GUIs, closely tied with CDE.”
“It was dang near perfect.”
“was waaaaaay better than Windows 3.0!”
“see Apache Comet or Databricks Photon”
Counts come from 1,791,911 Hacker News comments labeled by Claude, November 2025 to October 2026, with data through October 31, 2026. Counts updated 2 Nov 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.