Intel shuts down its high-performance “Clear Linux” distribution
After a decade of development, Intel is shutting down its Clear Linux OS distribution
It’s official, Intel is shutting down its Clear Linux distribution, a performance-optimised version of Linux that has been in development for over ten years. This comes at a time when Intel is laying off large numbers of employees as part of a major restructuring. Simply put, Intel’s leadership no longer sees Clear Linux as something that’s worth investing in.
Clear Linux is an optimised version of Linux that is designed to extract the most performance out of x86 hardware. This allows this distribution to achieve higher performance levels with Intel and AMD CPUs.
Intel has no plans to offer any further support to Clear Linux users, and the OS’ GitHub repository has been set to read-only mode. Clear Linux users have been encouraged to move to an actively supported distribution of Linux.
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.
Now, it is unclear what Intel’s Linux strategy will be moving forward. Last week, Phoronix confirmed that Kirill Shutemov, a senior Linux Software Engineer, has left Intel. Shutemov has left Intel after 14 years of working on Linux there.
Perhaps Intel will try to get some of the larger Linux distributions to optimise their performance for x86. Or maybe Intel will try to get some of their optimisations upstreamed. Either way, the loss of Clear Linux will be felt by the Linux community. After all, out-of-the-box OS performance is important. It’s certainly something that Microsoft Windows users would like to see a deeper focus on…
You can join the discussion on Intel ending its development of Clear Linux on the OC3D Forums.
