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

[starshipeleven]

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."

If the only reason you are on linux is because you rebuild stuff with different compile time options, he is right.

But that's far from the only reason to use Linux.

[starshipeleven]

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)?

Afaik there is no "performance-optimized" distro beyond Clear Linux and Gentoo.

[ms178]

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/

Thanks for the tips, and yes I do have very high expectations and Windows 10 also misses the mark, just as you said. Solus was actually my first distro which I tried after a long pause of using Linux alltogether (about 15 years) and I should re-visit it, but it didn't like the hardware of my laptop too much at that time (black screen issues made gaming impossible). They were also pretty slow on new packages and couldn't get a Chromium/Chrome build with VAAPI enabled which was a deal breaker for that system. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Manjaro pretty much do provide what I need - while not providing the best out of the box experience - both of them are flexible and easy to customize enough for me. Stability is a bit better on Tumbleweed though, at least if I don't mess too much with third party repos. But both projects could do more performance work and aren't too much optimized for desktop/gaming out of the box.

I haven't tried MX-Linux yet and never understood why it is so popular on Distrowatch these days. Maybe I should give it a try, but just from reading their website it doesn't seem to be the right fit to me. To name a few things I would look out for in my dream distro: 1) KDE/Plasma with kwin-low latency (or KwinFT when it becomes more stable), 2) Linux kernel with BMQ scheduler and tuned for performance and low-latency (I usually compile one with more aggressive compiler flags myself and configure it to my liking, disabling a lot of cruft and things I don't need), 3) a very recent but stable Mesa/LLVM/GCC/Glibc (incorporating some of Clear Linux patches would be great), 4) Chromium with VAAPI-patches, 5) great Steam integration (as my experiences with Steam as a Flatpack were not that great), 6) providing the infrastructure and tools to compile my own packages with some changes to the default compiler settings (a big plus if it is integrated into the system package manager).

[TemplarGR]

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)?

Arch is by far the best option on the desktop. While it is not -to my knowledge- performance focused for desktop and gaming too much, there is the ABS system, which lets you modify and re-compile any package you like yourself with your own parameters. Thus you can try optimizing some performance-critical components like MESA yourself, without breaking the rest of the installation. For example, let's say, instead of installing/upgrading the latest mesa package, you can get the PKGBUILD (that is the official script that makes the package for the distro) through ABS, modify it to compile with different options for you system, and install it instead. The pacman package manager will treat it like the official version for all intends and purposes, but it will be optimized by you. This thing you can do as much as you like, contrary to something like Gentoo which forces you to compile everything.

[torsionbar28]

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.

Sounds like you misunderstand the role and benefit of FOSS.

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."

If your only interest in Linux is the ease in which you can rebuild packages, I would tend to agree with your friend. But in that case, it sounds like you misunderstand the role and benefit of FOSS.

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.

In 2020, "server" = Linux, "desktop" = Windows, and "mobile" = Android and iOS. In terms of market share, macOS basically doesn't exist.

[TemplarGR]

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.

Pricing is no compelling reason to not use windows. You can always pirate them, it is very easy. Or get a key from a reseller at low price. I have never paid for a Windows licence except that one time i got XP with a laptop pre-installed.

As for your programmer friend, let me tell you a little secret (since i am also a programmer): Most programmers are idiots, and the vast majority are poor coders and don't understand shit about technology. You can't imagine the amount of shit i have listened from "professionals" through the years. So having a programmer friend telling you things don't mean squat, try working with a bunch of them for a while and suffering through the idiocy...

Yes, 4, 3, or even 2 decades ago, being a programmer meant you knew your shit, but these days every retard and his dog poses as a developer. Back when i went to computer science school coding was hard and you had to actually know your hardware, these days any clown can just write a script in some high level trash language and call himself a coder. Oh boy and they have huge inflated egos... I mean, yeah, programmers typically are socially inept, but these days anyone who can type a hello world program thinks he is a l33t h4xx0r. They are insufferable to work with, which is why i am contemplating of becoming a farmer and leaving the garbage tech industry for good. It is going to crash soon along with the economy anyway...

If you can't find a reason for using Linux, then don't. But Linux on the desktop is not about "ego". I have been using Linux on the desktop for decades and i never pretended that i was "better" than others who preferred Windows. I even typically promote Windows to people who just want to game and for chinese OEM hardware they buy at their supermarket to work with no issues. But Linux, if you take the time to handle it and can accept its limitations and issues, it is simply a better OS to use. It is safer, it does not spy on you, it is cheaper, you can customize it more. I could install Windows anytime i wanted on my desktop, in fact i had a partition with the latest Windows 10 not long ago, because i wanted to play Far Cry 5 and New Dawn and they don't play well with WINE yet. But i deleted it afterwards because i sincerely couldn't find a reason to keep it.

That is my professional advice anyway. Use what works for you. Even if you have to pirate it, who cares, since when Microsoft played fair to others so you have to worry about playing unfair to them? Gates is rich anyway and he is going to become richer by marking us with the Mark of the Beast and his 666 vaccines. No worries he isn't getting poorer any time soon. LOL

[kpedersen]

Good one. Servers and cloud "often" use a DE nowadays ("often" depending on area/application).

Not a chance is Gnome 3 seen on servers. Servers predominantly run either in some sort of Jail, LXC, VM, etc. They do not have access to a GPU when running bare-metal that could even start a typical casual Linux desktop like Gnome. The OpenGL support alone would not be enough. I am very glad Intel has stopped wasting man hours on that cruft.

Unless you meant hobbyist music "server" for home running on an old ASUS laptop with a broken screen?

Likewise VNC and ssh/X forwarding has been rendered completely useless with the silly "gamer" requirements. Gnome 3 is not fit for purpose as a server UI.

[chocolate]

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.

So, as I see it, your friend is sort of shaming you for exercising your sacrosanct right to build libre software to fit your own needs, an important freedom that is by itself reason enough to not abandon your current habits.
I would also object to that "nothing specific" citing one of Mr. Larabel's benchmarks around WSL: compiling software on Windows, even with a GNU userspace via WSL, takes longer than it does on LInux, due to the block layer not being as efficient.
So, let's say you save some time compiling VLC on Linux: you just started consuming your content that much quicker. Congratulations, you just used your own computer in a way that satisfies you, and you were facilitated by the operating system instead of being fought against for exercising your rights.

[wizard69]

I’m not surprised eventually Clear Linux will become nothing but some demo code for other distros. I kinda think that was the original intention. As for performance I wasn’t seeing well rounded results, they got significant gains in software that they could leverage hardware on but that isn’t everything in the Linux world. Real distros have to care about hardware other than X86 and things like GPU compute.

[kpedersen]

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."

Does he not know that you can also do that on Windows?

If you write software correctly (not apps; I mean actual software) and using a correct language (not Swift or .NET, I mean an actual language), it can be ported, customised and built on almost any platform.

To me he sounds like a Visual Studio user personally. Ask him. I bet I am right XD