Intel abruptly ends support for their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution
Intel has officially announced the end of support for Clear Linux, its open-source Linux distribution focused on performance and security. Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide updates, security patches, or maintenance for Clear Linux. The project's GitHub repository will be placed into read-only mode, making it unavailable for further community contributions or changes.
As a result of this abrupt end, users still running Clear Linux are strongly advised to migrate to another actively maintained Linux distribution to protect ongoing security and system stability. These steps are particularly urgent because unpatched operating systems face elevated risks from vulnerabilities.
While Clear Linux is being discontinued, it set benchmarks in Linux system performance with advanced optimizations such as profile guided optimizations, link-time optimizations, and various kernel modifications. These technical contributions highlighted what could be achieved with focused engineering in a general-purpose distribution.
Although Clear Linux development is ending, Intel engineers continue to collaborate with other major Linux distributions to pursue performance improvements. However, the full scope and direction of Intel’s ongoing Linux optimization efforts have not been detailed.
- Linux Distro
- Free • Open Source
External links
- All good things come to an end: Shutting down Clear Linux OSClear Linux OS • Official source
- Intel Announces It's Shutting Down Clear LinuxPhoronix
- Intel axes Clear Linux, the fastest distribution on the market — company ends development and support, effective immediatelyTom's Hardware
- Intel is shutting down Clear Linux OSNeowin
- Clear Linux Discontinued as Intel Pulls the Plug OvernightLinuxiac
- Intel Shuts Down "Clear Linux" Distribution DevelopmentTechPowerUp
Comments
TBH ARM is taking over the Desktop and Servers Linux for a long time now.
To be honest, I've never thought this distro would live up as much as ten years. It started as pet project to test Intel compiler on Linux kernel, then a bunch of bottlenecks have appear and since then Intel (i.e. few devs working there, a little less since few weeks) has been working to tweak the kernel and packages to get better performances on x86. So the work of Intel on Linux is far from finished, but it seems Intel will focus on mainline kernel and upstream projects (as AMD is doing), and that this project was redundant. Since no known distro was based on Clear Linux (but many patches are applied to other distros, like CachyOS), this won't be the end of the world.