Clear Linux Further Enhances Its Desktop Installer, Launches Help Forums

[M@GOid]

OK, so suppose today I'm buying a new laptop. Should I get an AMD processor that won't need Spectre/Meltdown mitigations, or do I go for Intel on Clear Linux?

The whole Spectre/Meltdown mess affected the performance of database-like programs, AFAIK. If you do not pretend to run these or games, I suspect you will have a better experience with a Intel based machine. And I say this as a confessed AMD fanboy.

As the model of the machine itself, if you do not choose one from a Linux only vendor, like System76, Purism, etc, or specific Dell models that are already sold with Linux installed, I recommend Lenovo's Thinkpad T-series. They are immensely popular among Linux programmers and tend to be very well supported. They cost more, but tend to be better built machines overall.

[Mario Junior]

Using for more than 1 week. With FFMpeg installed and Firefox recognizing the codecs, now everything is fine. No regrets! Using with an Xeon E3-1241 v3 and a RX 570. Just werks with my steam games.

[Guest]

Welp, I hope they provide an option to set up the system manually. I found OS installers to be pretty fragile in general, and considering my experiences with them, I prefer to set things up by hand. It doesn't take that much more time, and allows for greater flexibility.

[boxie]

Sure, I just thought Clear is more optimized for Intel.

It is, kind of.

Distro's will have a minimum supported level of instructions. So newer CPU features are not used (as much).

Clear Linux has more modern CPU requirements and a lot of optimisation work that has gone into making use of even more modern instructions (and therefore performance) where they can.

[skeetre]

Man... I just struggled through the text based installer earlier this week, finally got it installed, but can't get to a gui yet. This would have been nice to have.

[Michael]

Man... I just struggled through the text based installer earlier this week, finally got it installed, but can't get to a gui yet. This would have been nice to have.

It should be very easy to get to a GUI... Well, at least all I do on a text install afterwards is:

swupd bundle-add os-testsuite-phoronix

And reboot and at GDM log-in screen.

[skeetre]

Thanks, I'm using the nvidiafb driver on my RTX 2080 right now, trying to download the Nvidia binary driver. But I tried a startx just to see, it and fails to load. Thanks for the tip on the easy way to add the phoronix-test-suite.

[skeetre]

swupd bundle-add os-testsuite-phoronix

^ TAKES Forever! I thought it was going to be like doing a dpkg -i phoronix-test-suite.deb and done in a few seconds. Waiting on it to finish so I can reboot and load the nvidia drivers.

[Michael]

^ TAKES Forever! I thought it was going to be like doing a dpkg -i phoronix-test-suite.deb and done in a few seconds. Waiting on it to finish so I can reboot and load the nvidia drivers.

The way their bundles are setup, that command pulls down a whole desktop plus anything that PTS commonly benchmarks. Hadn't known you were just battling NVIDIA driver issues but rather thought you were unsure how to install a desktop.

[rstrube]

Of course not, wintel conspiracy uses gnome3 to prevent the Linux desktop success.

You are (sincerely) such an interesting person! I can't tell if you legitimately think there is a conspiracy or if you're just having a go at us and trying to stir us all up.

Personally I don't think Intel is trying to sabotage Linux, if so they would largely ignore the platform or make it difficult to use their hardware with it (binary blobs, etc.). They appear to be investing heavily in Linux - Clear Linux's performance improvements are tangible. They are very active contributors to Mesa, and their new GPUs will (most likely) have excellent Linux support from day 1. I know that you loathe Gnome and especially Wayland, but just because a company is investing in those technologies does not mean they're actively trying to sabotage Linux.

I asked you before in another thread - but you never answered. Why does it bother you so much when other user's choose to use a DE like Gnome? It seems almost personal for you. Xorg + XFCE will still be around 10+ years from now - they're not going anywhere!