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Shutting Down Clear Linux OS
- mrbluecoat 1y agoMy prediction is a handful of laid off employees will fork the repo and resurrect within a month with new branding.
- ThinkBeat 1y agoHopefully. But if Intel were paying them to do so, doing it for free without secure financial backing might not be appealing. I do hope you are right.
- nosioptar 1y agoSimilar happened when Mandriva went under and Mageia started about 15ish years ago. Mageia is my favorite of the Mandrake descendants.
- mepian 1y agoThe laid off employees will move on to a new full-time job, your fork will have to find maintainers somewhere else.
- hardwaresofton 1y agoKnowing which projects/languages/frameworks to invest time into and which to skip (even if they produce useful subprojects) is a superpower these days.
- iwontberude 1y agoAs soon as I saw it was a project by Intel I rolled my eyes and ignored it.
- toshinoriyagi 1y agoI mean, Clear Linux was the leader in the vast majority of Linux benchmarks, to my knowledge. So much so that even AMD used it in their advertised benchmarks for CPU releases because of the performance advantage. I think it was quite successful, and I doubt they are shuttering it because they don't see the value in it, but because of overall lackluster company performance and the new CEO cutting costs/the workforce aggressively.
- nine_k 1y agoIt being a Linux distro, I wonder how soon a viable fork will appear.
- bjconlan 1y agoFingers crossed. I probably just did my last fresh install of this a couple of days ago and my last swupd update now. You will be missed...
- Sunspark 1y agoI don't think there will be one, a company would need to commit to salaried devs. What would the value-added proposition be for them that they can't get by using any other distro out there?
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoThe problem is that Clear Linux did a lot of tweaking in their packaging to get good performance, up to and including actual code patching IIRC, so it would be a nontrivial ongoing effort to continue that work.
- yakz 1y agoAs a user I found it to be pretty buggy; driver issues on Intel NUCs causing instability.
- StableAlkyne 1y agoWhat's going on over at Intel anyway? This happened recently with Scitkit-Learn Intelex, which was a drop-in replacement for some parts of sklearn that was a bit faster. One day, the Intel channel on Conda just stopped working (and I learned that Anaconda loses the will to live when a random channel you installed one package from is unavailable) and another organization took over Sklearn Intelex. No communication could be found on Google connecting them to Intel (whose only news around the package was announcing the initial release a few years ago), you had to read the Git issue history to find people talking about the transfer. I still have no idea what even happened to their Conda channel after the sudden disappearance. The complete lack of communication just left a bad taste in my mouth...
- esseph 1y agoMultiple, multiple, multiple rounds of mass firings. Check the news past couple of months. Also completely outsourced all marketing.
- squarefoot 1y agoIs OpenCV still owned by Intel, or dependent by them (funding, engineers, etc)? There are many good distros out there, but to my knowledge OpenCV has no other FOSS alternative on par with it.
- mikepurvis 1y agoPretty sure Intel abandoned it like fifteen years ago, and then Willow Garage employed some of the people, now there’s an independent OpenCV Foundation. But I have no idea who’s actually paying the bills, behind the scenes.
- gchamonlive 1y agoAlso knowing when to give up and not get dragged into the sunk ship cost
- imiric 1y agoIt's not that difficult. Choose boring over trendy. Simple over complex. Stability and quality over speed and quantity. There is a lot of software that fits and optimizes for the former. Just be smart and selective about your choices, and avoid compromising.
- hardwaresofton 1y agoIt's not that simple actually -- this kind of thinking might leave you working on mainframes in 2000 (or even now) which is obviously a mistake. It requires a certain taste. There's a skill involved. > Just be smart and selective about your choices, and avoid compromising. This is a very "draw the rest of the owl" kind of statement
- imiric 1y agoWell, sure, but those weren't instructions. Just general guidelines to counter the claim that choosing safe technology requires superpowers. It is much simpler than that.
- kev009 1y agoDebian, FreeBSD.. the longstanding community software is immune from these kinds of rug pulls.
- mikepurvis 1y agoYes, but you pay a real cost for those choices too. A management plane that is non deterministic, imperative, and full of highly mutable state, not to mention basic stuff like the package manager metadata and cache not being shareable, and package installs all having to be serialized because they all call shell scripts as root. These limitations constrain even tools like dagger from providing a first class interface to apt like there is for apk because any deb could have rm -rf / as the postinstall script. A lot of normal users don’t feel these pain points or tolerate them by sidestepping the whole affair with containers or VM images. But if you’re in a position where these things have an impact it can be extremely motivating to seek out others who are willing to experiment with different ways of doing things.
- zymhan 1y agoI'll bet $20 your solution to the problems you posed is "Nix"
- hardwaresofton 1y agoI’m assuming a friendly tone here, and in a similar tone its funny because I also think Nix is not adopted because its benefits just aren't worth the cost to users (devs)
- mikepurvis 1y agoI did indeed deploy Nix to moderate success in a prior gig, but have held back pushing it at my current one; we're simply not at the scale where the problems that Nix solves are worth the cost (yet, maybe ever). For a less controversial take, consider alpine's apk package manager. For a single-use container that runs one utility in an early dockerfile stage, apk can probably produce that image in 2-3 seconds, whereas for an apt-based container it's more like 30 seconds. That may not matter in the grand scheme of things or with layer caching or whatever, but sometimes it really does.
- lispisok 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect "a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age."
- hardwaresofton 1y agoSure, but the counter is that you're going to be very late to some new foundational tech (ex. Kubernetes) that are legitimately useful. There are benefits to being early to a trend that has legs
- binary132 1y agoThere’s nothing wrong with getting involved in things that seem like they might be interesting without counting on their long-term survival. Hype-chasing on the other hand tends to be a bad plan.
- rdl 1y agoAlways bet against Intel whenever it's something software?
- avazhi 1y agoIntel will probably be somebody’s subsidiary for less than $150B sometime within the next 3 years, pending DOJ approval. Company is absolutely cooked.
- Sunspark 1y ago$150B is pretty cheap if it comes with ready-to-go chip fabs.
- mbreese 1y agoI’d expect the fabs to get spun off at some point a la AMD/GlobalFoundries.
- mepian 1y agoAMD/GF spin-off was backed by Saudi money, who is going to pay this time?
- Fade_Dance 1y agoUAE money
- RantyDave 1y agoYou have to remember it comes with a phenomenal debt load.
- dehrmann 1y agoThere's enough value still there... If you spit up chip design and fab, who would be interested in each? And is there enough x86 demand to keep the design side open? Windows on ARM is a thing, and data centers have been buying more from AMD than they used to.
- justinclift 1y agoSome are easy to see to avoid (ie Google, https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com), whereas others like this one are a bit more unexpected though make sense (to me) in hindsight.
- happycube 1y agoIntel's graveyard, even before this year, is just about as big as Google's.
- justinclift 1y agoInteresting, I didn't know that. Is there a list, like there is for Google?
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoRule #1: Exclude those with corporate ownership or dependence.
- hardwaresofton 1y agoHard disagree here, corporations almost always have the biggest pockets to fund continued R&D. There’s a tension there, but this is why it’s a skill — theres no simple rule. Fully open source community governed projects can be some of the most obviously good to ignore.
- binary132 1y agoUnmaintained free software is nearly as useless as corporate-sponsored OSS whose funding and support has disappeared
- TrevorFSmith 1y agoA good start would be to distrust anything made by a VC funded start-up or a once-great tech co. If you do want to use something they made, create a hard fork and pretend they already ditched the project as they inevitably will.
- hardwaresofton 1y agosure but this approach is limited, ChatGPT would have failed this test.
- binary132 1y agoyes
- Havoc 1y ago>Effective immediately, >we strongly recommend planning your migration Not even a brief period of advance notice to do a migration? Just one day no more security patches... wth is going on over at intel
- nightfly 1y agoMass firings
- bee_rider 1y agoIs this a guess, or have you heard something?
- dwattttt 1y agoIt's in the news
- charliebwrites 1y agoIntel Job Losses Mount as 4,000 layoffs are reported across multiple sites https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/intel-job-losses-mount-as-4-000-layoffs-are-reported-across-multiple-sites-in-california-oregon-texas-and-arizona/ https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/intel-job-losses...
- curt15 1y agoHow much notice did ppl get when sacked?
- shawn_w 1y agoA week, maybe 2 for this last round? They were announced on the 13th I believe, for "mid July" layoffs.
- nine_k 1y agoFrom my experience, none. "Utterly unfortunately, today was your last day with the company. A separation agreement has been sent to your personal email. Your corporate access is being revoked. Thank you for your contribution!" Being fired for poor performance is all about ample warnings, issuing a PIP, etc. The company wants the employee back on track. Being laid off is a situation that an employee cannot fix with their efforts. There's no incentive to work this week if it is already known that you are going to be laid off next week, but some employees might consider a prank or even minor sabotage as a helpless act of protest. It's safest to dismiss the laid-off ASAP.
- Thaxll 1y agoWas it the distro that was booting in couple of seconds or ms from what I recall?
- etaioinshrdlu 1y agoWhat optimizations did they do that had the biggest effect? can they be brought into the mainline linux kernel and distros?
- jeffbee 1y agoMostly it's just compiling everything correctly and getting the most juice out of transparent hugepages.
- temp0826 1y agoI could be wrong but I think they used icc (Intel's c compiler) for most/everything?
- jeffbee 1y agoI don't think they build any part of it with icc, the world's worst compiler. They do not even offer icc as a package.
- bjconlan 1y agoYeah, but there is something else here too... I used cachy for a heartbeat and it advertises the same benefits; it just felt slower (notably on boot) Maybe it was just all the graphical load screens. There's something clear had that made it feel modern, familiar and boring (which might not be for everyone) 90% of my tasks were in vscode devcontainers so kept things simple and out of the system for the most part.
- etaioinshrdlu 1y agoSounds like bloat removal and minimalism.
- ethan_smith 1y agoClear Linux's performance came primarily from function multi-versioning (CPU-specific optimizations at runtime), aggressive compiler flags (-O3, LTO, AutoFDO), kernel tweaks, and a stateless design that minimized I/O overhead.
- jcastro 1y agoSuch a cool project. One of my fondest memories was making my own steamOS with Clear Linux: https://community.clearlinux.org/t/notes-on-building-a-clear-steamos-appliance/169 https://community.clearlinux.org/t/notes-on-building-a-clear... And now I work on bazzite.gg, thanks for making a kickass OS Arjan and Co!
- indigodaddy 1y agoIs this the one that started out as ClarkConnect?
- bee_rider 1y agoPretty sure this is Intel’s Linux distro, the one that always benchmarked really well.
- indigodaddy 1y agoWas thinking of ClearOS, which started out as Clark Connect
- JohnTHaller 1y agoFor background: This was Intel's distro and it's likely that most/all of the folks that were maintaining it are a part of the 5,000 layoffs just announced, bringing the total Intel layoffs to 20,000 people.
- burnt-resistor 1y ago[flagged]
- potato-peeler 1y agoHow do you flag low quality comments in HN?
- abnercoimbre 1y agoToday? Happy Friday I guess. Getting mass layoff fatigue.
- jeffbee 1y agoThis news, which has been obviously coming for years, also tends to throw doubt on all of Intel's other software projects. Who, for example, would actually invest in exploiting QAT? Even though it clearly offers opportunities for massive gains in the right applications, it also carries the obvious risk that Intel will abandon it.
- mjevans 1y agoEven their other efforts, like GPU drivers. Chances are they _MIGHT_ still do Windows releases but probably not Linux.
- stevefan1999 1y agoHow I fork the CI pipelines and the source codes
- lockedinai 1y ago[dead]
- taosx 1y agoAlways found clear linux very interesting and wanted to give it a try but totally expected this.
- citizenpaul 1y agoIt's always interesting when a company announces that it has leadership in paycheck only. We are bankrupt of direction or ideas. Was are going to make panic knee jerk decisons in a public view. I guess to the ultra rich owner class it looks like work. Business idiots all around the MBA tree. I have no stake in clearlinux future or past, just observing.
- Bluestein 1y ago> leadership in paycheck only. With your leave I am borrowing this. Succinct yet so very descriptive.-
- cpburns2009 1y agoThat's a huge disappointment. Clear Linux has been reliably the fastest distro. I'm going to have to find a replacement distro for my Minecraft server.
- tiffanyh 1y agoThe perf was remarkably impressive & a testament to the team. Sad to hear about the team & shutdown. What’s the next best alternative for server use (CachyOS)?
- Iwan-Zotow 1y agoWhat would happen with MKL? My previous project depends on it
- kachapopopow 1y agoI was running this for a long time, only ever had a single crash from a live kernel update in 4 years that I had it on 3 AMD epyc servers.
- esseph 1y agoThis is both a neat anecdote, and also funny with the Epyc punchline at the end ;)
- kachapopopow 1y agoI just found the OS neat and thought it would work well for the (special at that time) AMD epyc core counts.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated perhaps: Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44585755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44585755
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoOoof. What a stellar project. Alas. I wonder how much this will affect Kata Containers, which is AFAIK like the best/only good way to run containers in k8s with the security of VMs? https://katacontainers.io/ https://katacontainers.io/ Man. There's so much amazing work Intel has done for the ecosystem. It's so hard so scary to imagine this world where no one else fills in so so much, so unclear who else does. Intel has done so so much for the ecosystem. It feels like open source has been an Immortal phalanx, always people to fill in: I hope so much I'm wrong but this shift in Intel feels like the death of the Immortal. What a pity that CHIPS act turned to dust, left such an amazing crucial industry hang out to dry.
- s_ting765 1y agoI maintain a custom kernel built on top of their patches optimized for performance that I now don't know what to do with.
- sprybear 1y agoThnks fr th Mmrs.
- oliwarner 1y ago> Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS If you've ever wondered how to lose all trust from your user base, it's the words effective immediately. People need time to move and this basically gives users until the first vulnerability. Thanks Intel.
- dehrmann 1y agoI'm in the market for a new desktop PC. Historically, Intel has been better, or at least more likely to have Linux support. Performance-wise, it's comparable enough for productivity use and maybe more power efficient, but the company is losing money, shipping bugs that can damage hardware, and disinvesting in software. I'm late to the party, but I feel like I have to go AMD.
- yyyk 1y agoCan't entirely fault Intel. Linux is mature enough to take care of itself, and Intel has other priorities. But they could have given a bit more notice.