Is Clear Linux Just A Toy Distribution By Intel?

[schmidtbag]

Clear isn't a toy, it's a proof-of-concept, and it proved its concept extremely well. But like all PoCs, they're not exactly intended to be practical or widely used. It is worth Intel continuing to work on this to prove what you can do with properly-optimized software on modern hardware. We don't really have another reference point.

If Clear were a toy, it would have no functional purpose (compared to anything else) other than "look what I can do". But Clear has a very distinct functional purpose, which is appealing enough that some people consider using it as their main distro, despite the crappy package management.

[CochainComplex]

im using clear linux since a few month as my daily work system. and i really love it. it is for sure no beginners distro and sometimes you have to tinker a lot - or use a flatpak. my assumption is that a lot of "its a toy distro" guys just dont accept the fact that this is not a plug and play ubuntu or mint. it is relativly new with the focus on performance - not beeing everyones darling. so to ship performance plus reliabilty you cant just clone some debian mirror. you have to start with the basics and them broaden your repos. thats what they do.

i fear that some linux rookies see the benchmarks and swap their ubuntu with clear and then they hope it will be the same game....dissapointment will be foreseenable

[uid313]

If Clear Linux can get improvements upstreamed to mainline so it benefits other distributions such as Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu then I am happy with that.

[sdack]

Is Fox News buying up Phoronix?! Calling Clear Linux a toy is an insult. Why pay attention to this?

[Michael]

Is Fox News buying up Phoronix?! Calling Clear Linux a toy is an insult. Why pay attention to this?

Just relaying how it was called in the mailing list post.

[skeevy420]

Clear isn't a toy, it's a proof-of-concept, and it proved its concept extremely well. But like all PoCs, they're not exactly intended to be practical or widely used. It is worth Intel continuing to work on this to prove what you can do with properly-optimized software on modern hardware. We don't really have another reference point.

If Clear were a toy, it would have no functional purpose (compared to anything else) other than "look what I can do". But Clear has a very distinct functional purpose, which is appealing enough that some people consider using it as their main distro, despite the crappy package management.

In my country we had a civil war over PoCs being practical and widely used.

I don't have a better comment for this article.

[andyprough]

I've tried it, but couldn't find a use for it. Clear's package management was so fractured that it took me awhile to figure out if I was installing the right bundles to get what I needed to do some basic work. When I went to look up available bundles, I was sent to Intel web pages listing hundreds of them, only to find after clicking through links that a large percentage of the bundles were no longer supported in any way. Flatpaks are often missing basic functionality, and are not an effective solution to a general lack of packages.

I often recommend that people use distros that I personally dislike based on their needs, such as Ubuntu. I know that the aspects of Ubuntu that I dislike are actually valuable features for some users. But with Clear Linux I could not honestly recommend this to anyone for getting any work done - I would just be wasting their time.

[andyprough]

Is Fox News buying up Phoronix?! Calling Clear Linux a toy is an insult. Why pay attention to this?

Michael was quoting Intel Fellow Arjan van de Ven. You should at least spend a millisecond scanning Michael's article before jumping into the comments section to blast him. Lazy trolling is the worst kind of trolling.

[Danielsan]

I thought that Clear Linux was meant to provide containerization services for Intel own clients...

[zxy_thf]

I thought that Clear Linux was meant to provide containerization services for Intel own clients...

I was thinking of that too, until they show no interests in support RHEL8 after I filed a bug...