Intel Announces It's Shutting Down Clear Linux

68 gpi 21 7/19/2025, 12:12:13 AM phoronix.com ↗

Comments (21)

burnt-resistor · 13h ago

Corporations, more often than not, are parasitic, good weather friends, and a let-down to FLOSS. They don't pay their fair share to support critical bits and they don't sustain projects with stability or usability when release things or take them on themselves. Their employee get performance points for adding new features, not making things usable, simple, or polished.

christophilus · 12h ago

Intel’s been pretty good with Linux driver support, though, no? I mean, certainly better than Nvidia.

kadoban · 11h ago

Intel is a huge contributor to linux, yeah. Drivers and way more have been done there, and I doubt all of that has dried up.

burnt-resistor · 11h ago

True that to both. There are exceptions here and there. The other extreme is FOSS-washing as a marketing gimmick like NanoKVM chaps my posterior.

pjmlp · 7h ago

With exception of those PowerVR based GPUs if I remember correctly, and for a long time their OpenGL driver were famous for lying about hardware capabilities, thus surprising devs with software rendering.

xemdetia · 6h ago

I think the thing you missed is how aggressive their firings had been. It is quite possible that they no longer have capacity to maintain a distribution. Public reporting indicates 5,000 people let go... but probably more were guided to leave.

If that is the case then terminating Clear Linux as a distribution might be the responsible thing if they were the source of direction for the distro. This was also a PoC distro as opposed to seeking enterprise workloads so it also seems reasonable that after the innovations that were good were adopted by more mainstream distros they no longer served a purpose.

I still expect to see a steady stream of kernel patches for new chips and features. I just would place headcount loss and accomplishing everything they set out to do with the distro over FOSS malice. Unlike many of the ghosts of malicious corp open source this doesn't fit exactly in my view.

belval · 4h ago

It baffles me how unreasonable some of the commenters are. Intel is trying to stop bleeding money and are cutting everything that's not core to their business. Side projects like clear Linux not being on the chopping block would be such a slap in the face of every employee that lost their job in the last year.

hibert · 1h ago

If you don't have these kinds of projects you eventually don't have market share in DCs. It only gets easier for purchasers like me to say no Intel when they haven't provided Intel specific optimizations so viewing that as side project or donation is misguided and not consistent with how Linus describes their relationship.

codpiece · 3h ago

Clear Linux was fast and FUN to work with, and the team were highly responsive a few years ago. The mood on their community board changed and they got more terse in their focus and responses. You could kind of feel a change coming.

Fortunately, some distros adopted their kernel optimizations; Pop_os, I think you can find it branched in Arch, not sure if others.

If any of the team are on this thread; thank you.

johnklos · 13h ago

Amiga is still going, while Clear Linux, Itanic, 32 bit x86, and macOS on x86 are dying.

Intel really needs to focus on fixing their CPUs. CPUs that degrade, that are unstable, that take literally 200 plus watts, that have security issues are not appreciated.

seabrookmx · 12h ago

"Still going" by some definition I suppose. I'm sure there's a few Itanium servers still in production too!

You're not wrong about the CPU's though. Mozilla recently had to disable crash reports for 13th and 14th gen because they're being swamped.. the EU heat wave seems to be tipping a ton of these chips over the edge.

mrbluecoat · 13h ago

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44611098

melling · 14h ago

Intel got left behind. TSMC makes their best chips because they can’t. They missed the AI boom. Only the paranoid survive.

I hope Lip-Bu Tan turns Intel around.

ksec · 11h ago

Not a bad thing and I would argue should have done it way earlier. Intel needs to focus. And so far Intel still feels extremely bloated.

vondur · 12h ago

That's too bad. Clear Linux was super optimized. I'd hope someone would continue doing the tweaks to the kernel that they did.

Qem · 2h ago

We still have CachyOS.

Szpadel · 1h ago

true, but they still borrowed patches from clear linux

CoastalCoder · 13h ago

I'm content as long as they keep maintaining VTune.

It's one of the main reasons I like Intel chips for my workloads.

pjmlp · 7h ago

They have to, they don't have other profiling tools.

fsckboy · 13h ago

AMD should fork it and carry it forward!

Qem · 2h ago

Instead of a fork they could just financially support and contribute code to CachyOS.

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Intel Announces It's Shutting Down Clear Linux

Comments (21)