Intel Announces It’s Shutting Down Clear Linux

The most depressing news of the week: Intel is ending their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution. Over the past decade the Clear Linux operating system has shown what’s possible with out-of-the-box performance on x86_64 hardware… Not just for Intel platforms but even showing extremely great performance results on AMD x86_64 too. But with the cost-cutting going on at Intel, Clear Linux is now being sunset.

Intel put out a statement that Clear Linux is being shutdown:

“After years of innovation and community collaboration, we’re ending support for Clear Linux OS. Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS, and the Clear Linux OS GitHub repository will be archived in read-only mode. So, if you’re currently using Clear Linux OS, we strongly recommend planning your migration to another actively maintained Linux distribution as soon as possible to ensure ongoing security and stability.

Rest assured that Intel remains deeply invested in the Linux ecosystem, actively supporting and contributing to various open-source projects and Linux distributions to enable and optimize for Intel hardware.

A heartfelt thank you to every developer, user, and contributor who helped shape Clear Linux OS over the last 10 years. Your feedback and contributions have been invaluable.”

Heartbreaking. In recent years I heard a few times of Clear Linux potentially being on the chopping-block due to cost-cutting at Intel and trying to emphasize out-of-the-box performance for the major Linux distributions and getting more of their work upstreamed as well. Today though it’s finally been made official.

Clear Linux has delivered many great out-of-the-box performance optimizations for Linux systems and shown what can be done for packaging with profile guided optimizations / link-time optimizations, various kernel tweaks, and other innovations over the years. At least the likes of CachyOS have picked up some of these optimizations. Intel engineers are also working with other major Linux distributions on enhancing their Linux distribution performance too. But those details and whether they will be ramping up those efforts or not remain unclear.

This caps off a week where a very prominent Linux engineer left Intel, an upstream Linux driver is now orphaned over another engineer departure, and various other Intel software engineers working on open-source/Linux also let go as part of the latest restructuring at Intel.

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