How Intel's Clear Linux Is Competing Against Late-2020 Linux Distributions

[skeevy420]

i left gentoo for exact this reason a few years ago.

but...well... i am on arch btw. arch is very user friendly when you are used to gentoo xD

IMHO, Arch is the most user friendly distribution once a Linux user knows what's what. Aside from systemd, it doesn't have any assumptions about how a system should be ran, how it should be configured, or what tools should be used do to a certain task. You just install it and do what you do. If you can't do what you do, the AUR will likely ensure that you can.

That said, Arch is neither easy nor user friendly if you don't know what's what. If you don't know why you should pick what you probably won't have a good time. Like, I know going in all the packages I'll need to make my version of a Plasma desktop, a customized Zsh environment, how to enable features with mkfs, how to partition/pool my system for backup tools and Windows gaming, etc. If you don't know anything about anything you're not gonna have a good time regardless of how well Arch's documentation is...arguably the best documentation there is.

[deusexmachina]

Shouldn't take long to steal Clear's top performance tricks and get them into your distro (or probably just your distro's kernel).

[schmidtbag]

Seems Clear doesn't have the immense lead it used to. Not sure if that means other distros have got better at implementing optimizations, or, that Clear has fallen behind.

[schmidtbag]

IMHO, Arch is the most user friendly distribution once a Linux user knows what's what. Aside from systemd, it doesn't have any assumptions about how a system should be ran, how it should be configured, or what tools should be used do to a certain task. You just install it and do what you do. If you can't do what you do, the AUR will likely ensure that you can.

Eh.... I don't agree. Arch is my favorite distro, but it's not user-friendly. Maybe one of the derivatives are (never tried them; don't care to) but the whole thing about knowing what's what is exactly why it's not user-friendly. For something to be user-friendly means it is intuitive for the average layperson. The fact it doesn't make assumptions also makes it harder to use, because something that is user-friendly typically involves hand-holding and gives you more than what you need, so you don't have to figure anything out yourself.
I think what you meant to say is Arch is the most competent and straight-forward distro. It cuts right to the chase and is relatively simplistic, which is why I like it so much. The AUR is also a pretty easy way to install stuff you wouldn't find in any distro's repos.

Arch's documentation is...arguably the best documentation there is.

I agree with this. The documentation is what makes Arch so accessible.

[grigi]

Its interesting when I have a real hard problem, searching for it will only ever turn up results in Gentoo or Arch's documentation.

The one reason I keep on going back to Gentoo, is because it effortlessly allows me to have multiple versions of the same thing installed, and I can downgrade a package (and keep it downgraded) if the need arises.

[Shtirlic]

I am using Clear Linux for work as my main OS on Dell XPS with Ice Lake from Feb-March and I should say it's really fast and performance is great but 4k screen and CPU eats battery so fast so it's not even useful in battery laptop mode, before I was using Win10 on the laptop from November with WSL and battery life was a way better. I spent many hours tuning tlp, msr registers, scheduler and some kernel options and still get around 3 hours of browsing and coding time, also I managed to make full hardware video decoding support in Firefox and Brave but it did not help a lot. The smallest wattage I can get now is around 1.5 watt for package with still usable frequencies and response time. One of the biggest issues for me is the lack of packages, so I have to steal rpms from fedora and install it like "--nodeps", some issues with configless approach. I am considering to switch to OpenSUSE tumbleweed and use Clear only on server and VM env.

PS
I don't get it why other distros can't catch up with Clear Linux ? Kernel configs, all patches and tricks are open source, boot loader, compressing method and mechanism for loading the kernel are transparent. Mystery to me, probably they don't care.

[Templar82]

I don't get it why other distros can't catch up with Clear Linux ? Kernel configs, all patches and tricks are open source, boot loader and compressing method and mechanism for loading the kernel is transparent. Mystery to me, probably they don't care.

Well they have caught up somewhat, but I believe a lot of the remaining optimisations are more specific to newer hardware that most distros don't want to limit their users to.

[skeevy420]

Eh.... I don't agree. Arch is my favorite distro, but it's not user-friendly. Maybe one of the derivatives are (never tried them; don't care to) but the whole thing about knowing what's what is exactly why it's not user-friendly. For something to be user-friendly means it is intuitive for the average layperson. The fact it doesn't make assumptions also makes it harder to use, because something that is user-friendly typically involves hand-holding and gives you more than what you need, so you don't have to figure anything out yourself.
I think what you meant to say is Arch is the most competent and straight-forward distro. It cuts right to the chase and is relatively simplistic, which is why I like it so much. The AUR is also a pretty easy way to install stuff you wouldn't find in any distro's repos.

I agree with this. The documentation is what makes Arch so accessible.

The way I see it, there are different degrees of user friendly. New User Friendly or Inexperienced User Friendly is something that describes Ubuntu or Manjaro whereas Arch is more Experienced User Friendly or Power User Friendly. Power Users almost always don't like the assumptions and hand holding, or why I loved Manjaro two years ago but don't like it now (they keep adding more things to hold hands). The hand holding puts too many layers between the person and the system which can make the system more difficult/annoying to use.

I suppose I do like Arch due to it being straight-forward and "simplistic". Simplistic is like user friendly, the meaning varies by context and person. In my case, a combination of the documentation and the minimal amount of patches made it simplistic. Any problem, there's the solution. How do I do this? Like that. I don't know so I read and learn. Simple. No logos or branding here. No extra crap included there. Not even a spiffy bash prompt. Simplistic.

Shtirlic Clear compiles packages in a way that makes them incompatible with processors made before 2011...anything before AVX. That has a lot to do with why they're faster and why other distributions aren't necessarily as fast as they are. There really isn't any agreed upon approach in providing an operating system that's both optimized and generically accessible to all x86_64 processors so we have things like Clear's method of AVX+ processor support that omits a lot of older CPUs, other distributions are trying LTO and other compiler and linker tweaks, OpenMandriva offers Ryzen enhanced builds (nzver1) which has Clear's limitation with AVX2, and more. It's not that they're not, it's that there isn't a way to do every enhancement and be universally accessible and usable by anyone, anywhere, with any x86_64 hardware.

[Royi]

Seems Clear doesn't have the immense lead it used to. Not sure if that means other distros have got better at implementing optimizations, or, that Clear has fallen behind.

May I guess is the kernel that got much slower. When all of them are much slower than before the gap has narrowed.
We may see this and validate the assumption when Michael will do a kernel test starting with 4.9.

[gregzeng]

Ubuntu has had its benchmark versions of the Linux kernels for years now; the Low Latency versions. It puzzles me that so few know that these exist.