Intel’s Clear Linux Project has been on my radar for months, mainly because of its sheer dominance over traditional Linux distributions — and often Windows — when it comes to performance. From time to time I check in on the latest Phoronix benchmarks and think to myself “I really need to install that.” Up until recently though, the installer for Clear Linux was anything but intuitive for the average user. It also looked considerably dated. Version 2.0 gives the installer a complete overhaul.
Aside from the fact it runs Gnome – which is not something I’d want to use – the main issue I have with this project is that it’s from Intel. The processor giant has had many Linux projects in the past, but it often just abandons them or doesn’t really know what to do with them.
I completely agree.
From what I’ve seen, Intel finally has a winner with this project. It is under constant development and has improved steadily over the years. I won’t run it as a production OS (I prefer Void Linux these days for its simplicity) but I’ve played around with it whenever I got a new Intel based machine just to see where it’s at. It’s pretty damn fast but it’s not quite ready for use as a daily workstation or production server.
I see it is somewhat faster, but when talking a desktop OS, I am more interested more about apps: are there available the apps I do want to use? Are they up to date, following the upstream? What about the odd app I may want to use once in a while, I may find it packaged for the distro?
For the time being, if the only desktop available is GNOME, it means I won’t even bother to try a live image of it.
From a security point: the lack of SELinux in Clear Linux troubles me. I like SELinux in my world-facing servers. There is no good reason to *not* have it.
For desktops, Gnome is for me a no-go. (Typing this from Arch Linux, using XFCE.) And especially for rolling release desktop-oriented usage, Arch is doing great, with lots of packages (AUR).
Call me again if it has all the packages of EPEL and SELinux included, then I’ll consider Clear Linux.
I have to admit that their handling of /etc is very attractive to me.
Their primary target audience is HPC usage, so in their case it really doesn’t make sense to have SELinux, as it just slows things down for no net benefit for their primary audience (and that’s assuming that things just work, SELinux is a serious pain in the arse to get set up correctly unless you happen to be able to use the official profiles without needing to modify them (which is rarely the case in my experience)).
I wholeheartedly agree about GNOME though, and even more so because Clear Linux is supposed to be an HPC distro (the only desktop I’ve found to be worse than GNOME 3 when it comes to efficiency is KDE, but that’s only because of their insane ‘semantic desktop’ crap).
Ok, if HPC is targeted, then SELinux indeed only slows things down. Agreed. Also I’ve felt the pain of fighting with SELinux; but it is a price I’m more than willing to pay for my personal webserver
For HPC, a desktop GUI doesn’t make much sense; Fluxbox would do… although XFCE doesn’t eat much CPU either. Also I agree about your KDE sentiments. I used to love KDE but I don’t need the semantic slowdown.
Still the /etc handling of Clear is very nice. It makes backing up your system configuration so easy. I hope other distributions will take notice.
It may be initially targeted at HPC, but we are commenting on an article about how Clear Linux becomes interesting for other types of users. You know, the old text install was just fine for HPC.
I would wonder if the memory allocation edge isn’t simply because the libc’s malloc isn’t glibc’s, but something like jemalloc or tcmalloc.
Pass…every Intel product that I have seen (and purchased a couple) that was geared towards the home user gets abandoned after Intel grows tired of things. Granted this is not an actual product they sell, but they dropped software that was provided for free not that long ago because they were too lazy to patch the security vulnerability.
I mean Moblin, Meego and Tizen have been smashing successes, rewarding all adopters with continued success.
New hardware has so many features and fixes that help old software perform better, and vice versa, is this article more of an indirect commentary about the lag and lead cycle between hardware and software development?
Is it inevitably true, not just from a Moore’s Law perspective, but from the fact that hardware developers naturally get delayed feedback. The longer software and hardware is out there the more they get to gather data against which they can optimise a design! So I’m not at all surprised Intel’s old Gnome runs better.
I installed it last week. As a desktop OS it takes a little getting used to. Swupd is very different to DNF & APT that I’ved used in the past. Overall it is missing some of the nice to have little touches that other distros have. Little things like Fedora’s Firefox build handles touch screens really well, and includes the DRM & flash plugins so Netflix / Prime / iPlayer works.
It could be cognitive bias, but it is crazy quick on my laptop.
Probably bias. Checking the benchmarks at Phoronix, except for Python3 and static web page SERVING, Clear Linux had a measurable improvement, but not one big enough to be noticeable.
Fair play. It seems like Gnome is stripped down compared to fedora / ubuntu. I thought I saw on Phoronix that firefox was quicker. I’ll have to go back and re-read.
The performance appears to be down to “aggressive optimization” which i would assume is less conservative compiler flags coupled with a modern compiler version etc… I’m assuming they also target a much newer processor, whereas many distros target a generic processor and thus cant take advantage of more modern cpu features.
So how would it compare to gentoo which has been tuned for the specific hardware?
I ran their check script to see if I could run it. I expected it to fail since I’m using an AMD processor, an FX6300. Funny enough, it said the processor was fine, but I failed because I don’t have an EFI BIOS. Which is TECHNICALLY true – my mobo has a UEFI BIOS. You know, the successor to EFI, which EVERY system made in the last decade has. How old of a system is Intel targeting that it requires an EFI BIOS as opposed to UEFI?
Are you running your UEFI BIOS in BIOS compatibility mode? I’ve had weird things happen with certain Linux distros in such a mode, while others will only install and boot properly in that mode; it seems to vary from one manufacturer to the other.
Perhaps try rEFInd as a boot/EFI manager?