Clear Linux 31530
Just as he was settling into the new Fedora release, Mayank Sharma thinks he’s found a suitable replacement.
Just as Mayank Sharma was settling into the new Fedora release he thinks he’s found a suitable replacement.
Clear Linux has been in development for years but has only recently widened its mandate to become a desktop distro. The USP of Intel’s distro is its performance optimisations for Intel architecture, as evidenced from the recent benchmarks from Phoronix. com, where Clear Linux outperforms its peers on Intel hardware.
But besides the optimisation advantage, Clear Linux is a unique distribution in several ways. It now ships as a Live ISO image that boots to a Gnome desktop, and now comes equipped with an intuitive graphical installer. The distro is built from scratch and offers several unique characteristics, such as its stateless design, which separates the user and system files on the filesystem. Intel claims it does this in order to strengthen the integrity of the installation.
The next interesting bit is its custom package management system that’s based on bundles that can be thought of as a collection of packages. A bundle contains everything an app requires, including its dependencies. The distro uses the swupd command-line tool to install and update the bundles as well as the entire installation.
The update process itself has some innovations, including the ability to do delta downloads, which means it’ll only fetch the changes and merge them with the installed components, in effect reducing the size of the updates. This is a good thing for something like Clear Linux, which by default updates quite frequently to keep up with the distros policy of rebuilding the entire OS and the bundles nine times a week. This is to ensure your installation has the latest upstream modifications and security patches. Thanks to a combination of these features, the distro provides users with the ability to create derivatives with relative ease, using its mixer tool.
Carry forward
While you can build a case for Clear Linux’s characteristics for its primary use cases, how do they translate to a desktop deployment?
Clear Linux looks and feels like a regular Linux desktop distro that runs a polished instance of the Gnome desktop. You’ll only have to deal with its peculiarities when you interact with its package management system. The desktop includes the Gnome Software app that you can use to install Flatpaks. There is no graphical frontend for browsing and installing bundles, although you can use www.clearlinux.org/software to browse and get singleline commands for installing bundles and Flatpaks.
The distro also stays clear of apps with licensing complexities, most notably the ZFS filesystem, Google Chrome and Ffmpeg multimedia libraries. Also, while the desktop does use several popular Gnome extensions such as Dash to Dock, you can’t install any additional ones, even after installing the desktop-apps-extras bundle that includes the Gnome Shell host connector. Besides the non-functional connector, the bundle also installs 19 additional bundles totalling over 400MB of apps, such as
VLC, Thunderbird, Darktable, Atom, Vinagre and more that you might not need.
In addition to wasting space, Clear Linux, in our opinion, is a bit too rigid for a general-purpose desktop. While it does run on AMD hardware, the 64-bit-only distro wouldn’t run on machines that ship with an old Bios-type firmware. It’s new app delivery mechanism also dramatically reduces the number of apps and libraries it currently offers compared to some of its mature peers like Debian, Fedora, Arch and Ubuntu.
If you can survive on Flatpaks, you’ll see Clear Linux as if its on performance-enhancing steroids. The addition of the graphical installer makes it more accessible to a large number of people, but at the same time its peculiarities, particularly the package management, prevents us from recommending it for general consumption just yet.