Clear Linux Now Offers Radeon Mesa Graphics Support, Yields Speed Advantage In Some Tests

[Vistaus]

We generally add things quickly as people show interest in things since adding packages is pretty automated for us.

Can I also put in requests for other desktop environments? 'Cause my two *current* favorites are KDE Plasma 5 and Trinity (TDE). I want to give Clear Linux a try as my primary desktop in the next few weeks (my new laptop should arrive this week) and it would be ace if I could use those two (or at the very least Plasma 5)

[andyprough]

CL has about 2000 "packages" (counting upstream tarbal as unit of 'package'). Sure it's not 10k... but it's also not 200.
We generally add things quickly as people show interest in things since adding packages is pretty automated for us.

I'm not saying you haven't made a good start - you clearly have. But Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE all have more than 60,000 packages available, and support numerous architectures and file systems. Do you think you could scale up to that size without using a package management system, other than ClearLinux's bundles?

[andy22]

I'm not saying you haven't made a good start - you clearly have. But Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE all have more than 60,000 packages available, and support numerous architectures and file systems. Do you think you could scale up to that size without using a package management system, other than ClearLinux's bundles?

Probably not with the current bundle system, but as mentioned adding official support for something like flatpack or whatever is the winner for this generations would supplement clearlinux bundle system.
The main problem is that while the bundle system ensures a "task" or environment is fully working and stable, it fails on granular picking a specific modification or binary. So the bundles only represent the default/standard solution for a given task, which is determined by clearlinux. As example cockpit is the default "remote-admin" bundle atm, so if you want something else it makes no sense to also add it to the bundle. So every time a task can be accomplished by multiple solutions, clear has to pick one or install multiple which is not ideal. So using stable bundles for basic tasks should work, if it can be supplemented by something like flatpack or containers.

[Danielsan]

As dumb user the only thing I see is the 580 performs almost fine as the VEGA 64 but it costs a third of the latter...

[cb88]

I'm not saying you haven't made a good start - you clearly have. But Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE all have more than 60,000 packages available, and support numerous architectures and file systems. Do you think you could scale up to that size without using a package management system, other than ClearLinux's bundles?

The numbers on alot of distros get a bit inflated as they split packages into -dev -doc -bin etc.... probably closer to 15-20k actual packages.

[andyprough]

Probably not with the current bundle system, but as mentioned adding official support for something like flatpack or whatever is the winner for this generations would supplement clearlinux bundle system.
The main problem is that while the bundle system ensures a "task" or environment is fully working and stable, it fails on granular picking a specific modification or binary. So the bundles only represent the default/standard solution for a given task, which is determined by clearlinux. As example cockpit is the default "remote-admin" bundle atm, so if you want something else it makes no sense to also add it to the bundle. So every time a task can be accomplished by multiple solutions, clear has to pick one or install multiple which is not ideal. So using stable bundles for basic tasks should work, if it can be supplemented by something like flatpack or containers.

But I've seen numerous reports that Flatpack (and similar) packages run significantly more slowly and use more resources than installing through a distro's native package management system. If true, that would quickly wipe out your ClearLinux speed advantage.

[andy22]

But I've seen numerous reports that Flatpack (and similar) packages run significantly more slowly and use more resources than installing through a distro's native package management system. If true, that would quickly wipe out your ClearLinux speed advantage.

Maybe, atm clearlinux is a experiment and its design was clearly aimed towards the cloud, vm's and containers. The fact that they have a working desktop is a bonus and like other distros you have to weight its pro's and con's. There is also the possibility that they change the bundle system, which atm i would doubt. So far i think clearlinux did achieve its goal and is officially supported by azure, while they keep working on it very actively.

I'm also not this familiar with flatpack, so i wonder where the speed loss is coming from. So for none GUI applications i don't understand why they would be slower, i assume flatpacks runs a native compiled binary on the host? I assume the speed loss is in regards to limited GUI/graphic stack support/utilization for certain flatpacks, which yes can be a problem, but that's something flatpack has to solve if they want any chance of this new system to gain traction.