Clear Linux Achieved Even More Performance Improvements During April

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Clear Linux Achieved Even More Performance Improvements During April

While Clear Linux has been outperforming other Linux distributions the past several years, it's a never ending job for them of continuing to lead the way in squeezing more performance out of x86_64 hardware on Linux. During the month of April, some more performance improvements were achieved though also a few regressions appeared to have slipped into their builds...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Clear-Linux-April-2019-Perf

[Mario Junior]

Using Clear Linux here but i can't compile the goddamn ffmpeg with x264 and x265 support because libx264-dev and libx265-dev aren't available on CL bundles and compiling x264 and x265 mannualy, ffmpeg can't find both on compile. Another thing is Firefox doens't play mp4 or gif files. This is annoying!

Oh, i forgot: gnome don't show thumbnails.

[FireBurn]

No harmonic mean?

[eydee]

Do these performance gains outweight the performance penalties of all the Meltdown patches?

[Spooktra]

Using Clear Linux here but i can't compile the goddamn ffmpeg with x264 and x265 support because libx264-dev and libx265-dev aren't available on CL bundles and compiling x264 and x265 mannualy, ffmpeg can't find both on compile. Another thing is Firefox doens't play mp4 or gif files. This is annoying!

Oh, i forgot: gnome don't show thumbnails.

You just discovered, it's easy to create a distro that's fast if you ignore the need for basic functionality.

[Guest]

You just discovered, it's easy to create a distro that's fast if you ignore the need for basic functionality.

If you remove your operating system, you'll get the best case scenario where 0 CPU cycles are used to run it, it's so fast that it doesn't even have boot times, as your firmware will show an error rather than running your operating system.

[OpenSourceAnarchist]

Mario Junior I'm waiting to use Clear when they don't expect their users to have to compile basic libraries to achieve basic functionality. I understand the legal issues of distributing proprietary codecs, but other distros have figured out how to separate free and non-free software, and until I can watch h254/265 videos on Firefox or mpv easily, it is not being installed on my computers. I would use it in a flash if this gets resolved! (I have a Haswell CPU and an AMD HD 7750 GPU -- not likely to be supported by Clear even when they do get ffmpeg issues resolved!)

[ms178]

Mario Junior I'm waiting to use Clear when they don't expect their users to have to compile basic libraries to achieve basic functionality. I understand the legal issues of distributing proprietary codecs, but other distros have figured out how to separate free and non-free software, and until I can watch h254/265 videos on Firefox or mpv easily, it is not being installed on my computers. I would use it in a flash if this gets resolved! (I have a Haswell CPU and an AMD HD 7750 GPU -- not likely to be supported by Clear even when they do get ffmpeg issues resolved!)

That is one of the items I hope that Intel will address if they want to get a better foothold in the Linux desktop market. Chromium with VAAPI patches included is another. Thinking from the end user perspective and the best possible experience is the key here.

[ms178]

Clear Linux is more of a show-case distribution. Intel doesn't really have interest in investing in a zero return-on-invest market that the Linux desktop is.

As Microsoft and Apple are doing some ARM work nowadays, this reasoning could change rather quickly. Intel could try with other interested parties to push Linux as a gaming platform, too. They could squeeze the last bit of performance of their CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs and show the world what the performance on their hardware with the best possible software optimizations looks like.

[microcode]

It seems like many of these gains are preferable on any distro. What exactly prevents other distributions from building at least some critical packages this way? A marginal improvement in, for example, a JPEG decoder library, could considerably improve the experience of browsing the web.