Intel's Clear Linux To Divest From The Desktop, Focus On Server + Cloud Workloads

[Sonadow]

i'm pretty sure thats how it is for most of other distros and microsoft too

There is a very big difference between tooling an OS for specific use cases or general-purpose desktop/laptop usage.

Microsoft chose to make Windows general-purpose for desktop, laptop and even embedded usage. So do the big-name distributions like Debian, OpenSuse and Fedora.

[edwaleni]

Their survey of their own developers last year showed hardly anyone was using it, so this is no surprise whatsoever. Too bad they spent so much time promoting it and making promises. Reminiscent of a Canonical type of move.

Not sure if you could say Intel did *any* promotion of it. Phoronix picked up on it, put it in their test group of OS's and wrote a bundle for PTS.

Then by adding it to his test cycle and determining its superior performance, the Phoronix articles got picked up by various press channels like Jason Evangelho for Forbes.

The only promise I can recall the CL Team made was to put a GUI on it. And they did so.

The rest was all responses to requests and they said they would look into it. And from what they said online, that list was getting longer daily.

What else did they promise?

[starshipeleven]

These guys have been getting bombarded with all sorts of questions ranging from the noob stuff (why doesn't it install?) to complaints about why a certain file system isn't on the GUI choices, why some really obscure piece of hardware isn't supported. Some dude was belly aching because he couldn't set up his point of sale system on it. (really?) Some people were just downright rude when Clear wouldn't work in their very specific use case. It was like they were personally offended Intel didn't build it for them!

This is normal, anyone doing techsupport or even retail can confirm.

[starshipeleven]

Makes sense. Back to the core and stick with the default. Fedora also reduced the testing scope outside the default desktop.

Their "default desktop" is not your "default desktop", btw

[starshipeleven]

for desktop most of people use the only one good Ubuntu

You misspelled OpenSUSE

[mppix]

I think it is fairly worrying that no-one has managed to get Linux running on those locked down Surface RTs yet. If Microsoft does decide to get serious and put a standard ARM port of Windows on them so they have a chance of hitting off; it will seriously reduce the amount of potential FOSS laptops.

As for Clear Linux; any time not wasted on the Gnome DE is probably good (even for desktop users). There are more important innovations to be had than trying to fix a broken (by design) desktop package. A modular monolith (like another old fashioned technology: http://troubleshooters.com/linux/sys...ol_systemd.htm)

Good one. Servers and cloud "often" use a DE nowadays ("often" depending on area/application). Since Gnome is default, they will probably make sure that vanilla Gnome runs somewhat smoothly and leave the rest to the community. Also ClearLinux makes aggressive use of systemd that manages boot, networking, startup, etc. that very possibly contributes to their high performance.

While this is somewhat sad, ClearLinux would still need a lot of effort to catch up to the debians, fedoras, and archs for desktop use. Personally, I always viewed ClearLinux as a reference design that demos what is feasible. This won't change and hopefully the debians, fedoras, and archs will pick up some of the ideas.

[ms178]

The birds were singing it from the tree already that they were about to cut their desktop efforts. And I can fully understand that they want to narrow their scope and focus their ressources. On the other hand, I still miss a user friendly performance-optimized desktop / gaming distro which is well supported and well tested. Ubuntu, Manjaro and openSUSE Tumbleweed are not optimized enough for my taste. Do you guys have any recommendations (Gentoo would be too hard to setup and maintain)?

[Guest]

As long as they have a way to have a minimal install and X.org, this is not a problem. I just hope they won't shove GNOME and it's cancerous keyring deep into their distro, as it will make it unusable.

[Sonadow]

I think it is fairly worrying that no-one has managed to get Linux running on those locked down Surface RTs yet. If Microsoft does decide to get serious and put a standard ARM port of Windows on them so they have a chance of hitting off; it will seriously reduce the amount of potential FOSS laptops.

Then I will just use Windows. As it is right now, I have almost no compelling reason to use Linux now beyond pricing, Microsoft's stupid rolling release requirements and the ease of making my own builds of popular applications like Firefox, Chromium, Wireshark and VLC.

If it ever comes to that I'll learn to do those things in Windows. As my programmer friend told me bluntly; "you are not coding anything. You are just taking a bunch of source code with ready-made makefiles from the maintainers and changing the compile time options. You have *nothing* specific on Linux other than your desire to be different and to stoke your ego about being 'better' than others."

For what it's worth, that friend of mine is a career programmer and develops software for web, Windows, Android and iOS. But for some reason, he refuses to do software development for macOS.

[andyprough]

I still miss a user friendly performance-optimized desktop / gaming distro which is well supported and well tested. Ubuntu, Manjaro and openSUSE Tumbleweed are not optimized enough for my taste. Do you guys have any recommendations (Gentoo would be too hard to setup and maintain)?

That's a tall order. Windows 10 itself fails on 2 or 3 of your criteria on a regular basis. I've heard good things about Solus for gaming.

An interesting new player in this area is MX-19.1 x64 ahs, with Advanced Hardware Stack: https://mxlinux.org/download-links/