With the somewhat surprising announcement this week that Intel's Clear Linux platform would be divesting from the desktop and focusing on server and cloud workloads, the first visible changes on the desktop side are expected next week.

Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux has made some inroads in the desktop space over the past two years with providing a nice desktop installer last year, enhancing their documentation, and making available more desktop packages. Clear Linux has offered some of the fastest performance even for desktop workloads like web browser performance and has worked out equally well on AMD hardware. But moving forward they are going to be shifting back to their roots on focusing on server and cloud workloads.

One of the common criticisms for those trying to use Clear Linux on the desktop is that it lacks easy access to proprietary packages like Google Chrome and Steam. There has been plumbing within its swupd package/bundle management system to support third-party repositories to expand the ecosystem and now we're finally seeing that happen.

A user experimenting with Clear Linux had an opinion to share on their mailing list and referred to it as a "toy" distribution and some of our readers have expressed similar opinions on it. Here is the response by one of the Intel developers central to Clear Linux's development.

One of the most frequent critiques of Intel's Clear Linux distribution has been its lackluster support in dealing with proprietary/third-party packages like the Google Chrome web browser and Valve's Steam gaming client. Since last summer, Clear Linux has been working on their third-party packaging support with their unique "bundles" system, but not much has been heard on the matter since.

Clear Linux looks poised to join the ranks of the few Linux distributions allowing it to run off an F2FS root file-system.

Given the recent discussions over the default performance of the Linux scheduler, the Liquorix patches to the Linux kernel, and other recent forum discussions over different kernel configurations and flavors, here are some reference benchmarks looking at the performance of some of the kernel options available to Clear Linux users.

Following Fedora's plans to begin using EarlyOOM by default and other recent upstream discussions about Linux's relatively poor performance when it comes to the Linux desktop not handling memory pressure / low RAM situations well, Intel's Clear Linux looks like it will soon offer EarlyOOM as an option.

In addition to Clear Linux seeing more performance optimizations in 2019 (more so than Fedora and Ubuntu during the year), it also benefited from a new desktop installer, new help forums, and more of Intel's partners talking about their current or planned usage of Clear Linux.

With our various ending-2019 and end-of-2010s articles, the standout on the Linux performance front has certainly been Intel's Clear Linux in consistently delivering the leading Linux x86_64 performance throughout all of our testing on many different tests and hardware platforms. Here's a look back at some of the Clear Linux highlights.

One year and one week since announcing the Deep Learning Reference Stack built atop Intel's open-source technologies like Clear Linux and Kata, the Deep Learning Reference Stack 5.0 was released today.

A month ago at the Open-Source Summit Europe 2019 in Lyon, France, Intel's Kelly Hammond who serves as the company's Senior Director of System Platform Software talked up their open-source contributions with a particular emphasis on performance. The video from that keynote was recently published for those curious about Intel's open-source work in the name of performance, including Clear Linux.

Intel developers are still working on some interesting improvements to Clear Linux itself this quarter on top of keeping up to date with the latest upstream software it packages.

For those that had been interested in GNOME 3.34 for Intel's Clear Linux when running their developer-focused, performance-optimized desktop those packages have now landed.

Often when doing cross-distribution benchmarks, readers often comment on the performance of Clear Linux particularly for video encoding use-cases as surprisingly different from other distributions. Some argue that it's just over the default CPU frequency scaling governor or compiler flag defaults, so here is a look at that with Ubuntu 19.10 daily benchmarked against Clear Linux.

For those anxious to make use of GNOME 3.34 with its many own performance improvements atop Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux rolling-release distribution, it looks like the wait is still going on for a few more days but is coming "soon-ish" to the platform.

Given the interest last week in how Clear Linux dropped their kernel boot time from 3 seconds to 300 ms, here are some fresh boot time benchmarks of Clear Linux compared to Ubuntu 19.10 on both Intel and AMD hardware.

Intel's speedy Clear Linux distribution could be running under the hood of your car.

Intel engineer Feng Tang spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal on how the Clear Linux team managed to boot their kernel faster. They started out with around a three second kernel boot time but cut it down to just 300 ms.

You may recall that back in July Intel's Clear Linux team was looking for feedback on Linux developer workflows and other developer preferences. This survey wasn't limited to Clear Linux users and the results are now published which provide for some interesting data points.

Intel's Clear Linux team on Wednesday announced their Deep Learning Reference Stack 4.0 during the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit North America event taking place in San Diego.

While Arch Linux remains the gold standard for quality Linux documentation, Intel's Clear Linux has rolled out a new documentation web-site to assist new/existing users in making use of this performance-optimized and security-oriented Linux operating system.

For more than one year we've been hearing of Clear Linux working on Windows WSL support to allow for this performance-optimized Linux distribution to run within Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux. There isn't an official release yet, but at least now is a third-party installer/script for making it possible to setup such a configuration.

Over the course of July, Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux distribution shifted from Linux 5.1 to the brand new Linux 5.2 kernel, pulled in the latest GCC9 branch compiler fixes, updated to Python 3.7.4, rolled out a new OpenJDK build, and had many other package updates and original optimizations applied.

In recent months we've heard of Intel engineers working on better supporting third-party packages on Clear Linux that would be akin to Arch's AUR, Ubuntu's PPA, or Fedora's Copr systems for allowing unofficial/third-party packages to be more easily made available particularly in cases of closed-source software. It looks like that internally that system is now in beta as they work towards having more software available on Clear Linux.

Intel's Clear Linux crew has launched a twelve-question survey seeking feedback on your Linux usage though the survey slightly caters towards developers. While the survey is being put out by Intel's performance-oriented Linux distribution, users of any Linux platform are encouraged to participate.

While Clear Linux as part of its standard bare metal installations has long defaulted to having an AVX2-optimized GNU C Library installed by default, it turns out that it wasn't part of the default os-core bundle as used by containers. That though is changing and should yield even better out-of-the-box performance when running Clear Linux within containers.

Auke Kok of Intel / Clear Linux carried out the distribution's first ask-me-anything session today where he fielded questions ranging from Steam to under-served software projects.

Last month Clear Linux rolled out new kernel options as bundles for those wanting to run a mainline/vanilla kernel build on this Intel open-source distribution without their extra patches applied as well as other options. Here are some benchmarks of those different kernel flavors available to Clear Linux users.

Most Linux distributions allow unfettered access to dmesg for seeing the kernel log outputs, but seeing as kernel addresses can be dumped to this output and could be exploited by bad actors, Clear Linux is joining the select few Linux distributions so far blocking non-root users from seeing this output mostly used for debugging purposes.