Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" Running Great With Clear Linux, Sizable Wins Over Ubuntu

[BHZeto]

When Clear Linux is compiling faster, that is just a narrow use case, Ubuntu is better because it's for the general public.
When Apple M2 is compiling faster, that is so cool, and look how thin and sleek and expensive it is!

[M@GOid]

Is anyone here using Clear Linux in production, or is it just PR for Intel?

I would say it depends on your workload. I for one can totally see people that run servers for number crunching utilizing bleeding edge distros, simply because the benefits can outweigh the headaches.

[WannaBeOCer]

Is anyone here using Clear Linux in production, or is it just PR for Intel?

I use it in a production CPU cluster with SLURM, as a desktop I stopped using it a long time ago due to licensing limitations for video playback. I think the majority of those issues are now resolved due to more Flatpaks. I also got frustrated with swupd breaking Nvidia drivers but in August it seems like that was resolved. I still prefer Solus Linux though for personal use.

[Paradigm Shifter]

As noted in the conclusion, I'll be interested in Clear vs. Ubuntu on 13900K and 7950X, given the AVX-512 capabilities of the latter is lacking in the former.

But other than that... I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Well. Not really that shocked. We've known for ages that default Clear config tends to outperform every other distros default config. Sometimes by a lot, sometimes by a little. Occasionally, it gets beaten.

I really should given Clear another go; the last time I looked at it I basically gave up after a couple of days because Gnome Shell just distracts me too much, and for whatever reason I was having a devil of a time getting any other desktop to build.

[vegabook]

"Intel! My hero!" 💋🍆 - Phoronix.

"Sizable wins against Ubuntu" is a loaded headline. Honestly like, you know, Ubuntu needs to target 50% of the Linux user base, whereas Clear Linux targets 0.005% of it.

Let's keep things in perspective. The fact is that one is a mainstream distribution needing to be fairly conservative with its choice of targets and optimizations, whereas the other is a lab-grown experiment with close-to-zero real-world relevance, meant to showcase an interested party's hardware.

"Clear Linux cutting edge optimizations continue to offer important performance gains" might be the kind of headline I think would be less incendiary. Nobody chooses Ubuntu for cutting edge performance. It's chosen for stability, attention to detail, and most important, network effects, being by far the easiest distribution to obtain online support for, and therefore, acceptance in corporate settings. Explicitly hammering this one distribution for not matching Intel's ultra-optimized corner-case is disingenuous.

[Linuxxx]

You can probably gain much of the improvements from Clear Linux just by configuring Ubuntu to use the performance governor at all times. From an earlier Phoronix article, the default governor seems to represent at least 50% of the performance difference between stock Ubuntu and Clear Linux.

This was noted in the Zen 4 comparison: https://www.phoronix.com/review/zen4-clear-linux

True!

It's a real shame that not all major Linux distros are defaulting to the performance governor, at the very least on the desktop.

But one day, Ubuntu will have to make the jump to stay competitive, because RHEL 9 already makes use of it by default, after having taken "inspiration" from Intel's Clear Linux...

[Brook-trout]

Microsoft/Ubuntu is not the performance Linux your looking for.

[Danielsan]

Is anyone here using Clear Linux in production, or is it just PR for Intel?

[Calinou]

You can probably gain much of the improvements from Clear Linux just by configuring Ubuntu to use the performance governor at all times. From an earlier Phoronix article, the default governor seems to represent at least 50% of the performance difference between stock Ubuntu and Clear Linux.

This was noted in the Zen 4 comparison: https://www.phoronix.com/review/zen4-clear-linux

It'd be interesting to see Fedora increase its compiler flags baseline to build for SSE4.2, which should help a little without harming compatibility too much. This would mean dropping support for AMD Phenom and Bulldozer CPUs, but even the lowest-end Celeron (starting from Sandy Bridge) would still be able to run Fedora, unlike an AVX1 requirement.

[CommunityMember]

Nice!
I wish that Debian developers would implement in Debian too some of these improvements in Clear Linux.

Some of the improvements would leave legacy hardware behind, which is an important reason that many distros targeting users have chosen to not to use the Clear Linux compiler settings (enterprise distributions have a much different target audience, and some have been moving the requirements forward).

So the question for the Debian community is do you obsolete older hardware for the best performance on more current hardware? If there is a strong consensus, it can happen.