Shutting Down Clear Linux OS
101 comments
·July 18, 2025JohnTHaller
For background: This was Intel's distro and it's likely that most/all of the folks that were maintaining it are a part of the 5,000 layoffs just announced, bringing the total Intel layoffs to 20,000 people.
burnt-resistor
Replacing Americans and Israelis with H-1B workers who will work for less and be beholden to their employers like contract manufacturer dormitory-style sweatshops.
abnercoimbre
Today? Happy Friday I guess. Getting mass layoff fatigue.
Havoc
>Effective immediately,
>we strongly recommend planning your migration
Not even a brief period of advance notice to do a migration? Just one day no more security patches...
wth is going on over at intel
benoau
> wth is going on over at intel
Thousands of layoffs. It's surprising someone even had time to post the notice.
fsckboy
no, the message poster keeps his job, so expect more messages
burnt-resistor
Round after round of layoffs is terrible for morale and drives away existing good talent. Layoffs should cut deep... once. Corporations these days are rehashing the unwise, bureaucratic stupidity of decades past.
burnt-resistor
We need a FuckedCompany2.com these days.
Bluestein
Intel. The Nvidia of the 90's. Oh success, you fickle fickle bride.-
curt15
How much notice did ppl get when sacked?
nine_k
From my experience, none. "Utterly unfortunately, today was your last day with the company. A separation agreement has been sent to your personal email. Your corporate access is being revoked. Thank you for your contribution!"
Being fired for poor performance is all about ample warnings, issuing a PIP, etc. The company wants the employee back on track. Being laid off is a situation that an employee cannot fix with their efforts. There's no incentive to work this week if it is already known that you are going to be laid off next week, but some employees might consider a prank or even minor sabotage as a helpless act of protest. It's safest to dismiss the laid-off ASAP.
dontlaugh
It’s also not legal in much of the world to do that, thankfully. There’s weeks/months to negotiate collectively with the company, possibly organise a strike with those not at risk of redundancy or even just to say goodbye to coworkers.
KennyBlanken
"Employees might sabotage stuff" is something parroted constantly and there's never any proof it is a significant issue.
shawn_w
A week, maybe 2 for this last round? They were announced on the 13th I believe, for "mid July" layoffs.
fsckboy
hopefully no notice. employed people need to maintain savings for a rainy day in case they are suddenly unable to work, which can happen for any number of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with the company.
telling struggling companies that they need to keep savings around so they can pay a bunch of employees when the company already knows that nothing will come of that work is silly.
you can keep money in the left pocket or the right pocket, it's the same amount of money. But saying "keep double money in both pockets" makes no sense, it's inefficient. money is not easy to come by. because companies operate at a larger scale, over many employees, it seems like they have money all over the place, but most company are capital constrained all the time. (companies that are not capital constrained often pursue foolish ideas, too much expansion, etc.)
it's just a question of what the social contract is, and making the social contract be "employees can be as irresponsible as they want, somebody else will take care of it" sets a bad standard. Employers would rather hire responsible employees, and being responsible to yourself and your family is step one; and without regard to what employers want, it will make you a better person.
briansteffens
Maybe it's time for me to stop using this website
AlotOfReading
but most company are capital constrained all the time.
Most employees are capital constrained at all times. The median American has $8000 in savings, and 30% have <$500.dontlaugh
I rarely resort to this sort of comment online, but I feel it is warranted in this case: fuck you.
Zone3513
Why won't someone think of the poor struggling companies!!
nightfly
Mass firings
bee_rider
Is this a guess, or have you heard something?
charliebwrites
Intel Job Losses Mount as 4,000 layoffs are reported across multiple sites
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/intel-job-losses...
dwattttt
It's in the news
yeah879846
wth
jcastro
Such a cool project.
One of my fondest memories was making my own steamOS with Clear Linux: https://community.clearlinux.org/t/notes-on-building-a-clear...
And now I work on bazzite.gg, thanks for making a kickass OS Arjan and Co!
jauntywundrkind
Ooof. What a stellar project. Alas.
I wonder how much this will affect Kata Containers, which is AFAIK like the best/only good way to run containers in k8s with the security of VMs? https://katacontainers.io/
Man. There's so much amazing work Intel has done for the ecosystem. It's so hard so scary to imagine this world where no one else fills in so so much, so unclear who else does. Intel has done so so much for the ecosystem. It feels like open source has been an Immortal phalanx, always people to fill in: I hope so much I'm wrong but this shift in Intel feels like the death of the Immortal. What a pity that CHIPS act turned to dust, left such an amazing crucial industry hang out to dry.
citizenpaul
It's always interesting when a company announces that it has leadership in paycheck only.
We are bankrupt of direction or ideas. Was are going to make panic knee jerk decisons in a public view.
I guess to the ultra rich owner class it looks like work. Business idiots all around the MBA tree.
I have no stake in clearlinux future or past, just observing.
Bluestein
> leadership in paycheck only.
With your leave I am borrowing this. Succinct yet so very descriptive.-
hardwaresofton
Knowing which projects/languages/frameworks to invest time into and which to skip (even if they produce useful subprojects) is a superpower these days.
lispisok
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
"a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age."
hardwaresofton
Sure, but the counter is that you're going to be very late to some new foundational tech (ex. Kubernetes) that are legitimately useful. There are benefits to being early to a trend that has legs
kev009
Debian, FreeBSD.. the longstanding community software is immune from these kinds of rug pulls.
mikepurvis
Yes, but you pay a real cost for those choices too. A management plane that is non deterministic, imperative, and full of highly mutable state, not to mention basic stuff like the package manager metadata and cache not being shareable, and package installs all having to be serialized because they all call shell scripts as root. These limitations constrain even tools like dagger from providing a first class interface to apt like there is for apk because any deb could have rm -rf / as the postinstall script.
A lot of normal users don’t feel these pain points or tolerate them by sidestepping the whole affair with containers or VM images. But if you’re in a position where these things have an impact it can be extremely motivating to seek out others who are willing to experiment with different ways of doing things.
zymhan
I'll bet $20 your solution to the problems you posed is "Nix"
TrevorFSmith
A good start would be to distrust anything made by a VC funded start-up or a once-great tech co. If you do want to use something they made, create a hard fork and pretend they already ditched the project as they inevitably will.
hardwaresofton
sure but this approach is limited, ChatGPT would have failed this test.
rdl
Always bet against Intel whenever it's something software?
justinclift
Some are easy to see to avoid (ie Google, https://killedbygoogle.com), whereas others like this one are a bit more unexpected though make sense (to me) in hindsight.
happycube
Intel's graveyard, even before this year, is just about as big as Google's.
justinclift
Interesting, I didn't know that.
Is there a list, like there is for Google?
BLKNSLVR
Rule #1: Exclude those with corporate ownership or dependence.
hardwaresofton
Hard disagree here, corporations almost always have the biggest pockets to fund continued R&D.
There’s a tension there, but this is why it’s a skill — theres no simple rule. Fully open source community governed projects can be some of the most obviously good to ignore.
gchamonlive
Also knowing when to give up and not get dragged into the sunk ship cost
imiric
It's not that difficult. Choose boring over trendy. Simple over complex. Stability and quality over speed and quantity.
There is a lot of software that fits and optimizes for the former. Just be smart and selective about your choices, and avoid compromising.
hardwaresofton
It's not that simple actually -- this kind of thinking might leave you working on mainframes in 2000 (or even now) which is obviously a mistake.
It requires a certain taste. There's a skill involved.
> Just be smart and selective about your choices, and avoid compromising.
This is a very "draw the rest of the owl" kind of statement
tiffanyh
The perf was remarkably impressive & a testament to the team.
Sad to hear about the team & shutdown.
What’s the next best alternative for server use (CachyOS)?
etaioinshrdlu
What optimizations did they do that had the biggest effect? can they be brought into the mainline linux kernel and distros?
ethan_smith
Clear Linux's performance came primarily from function multi-versioning (CPU-specific optimizations at runtime), aggressive compiler flags (-O3, LTO, AutoFDO), kernel tweaks, and a stateless design that minimized I/O overhead.
jeffbee
Mostly it's just compiling everything correctly and getting the most juice out of transparent hugepages.
bjconlan
Yeah, but there is something else here too... I used cachy for a heartbeat and it advertises the same benefits; it just felt slower (notably on boot) Maybe it was just all the graphical load screens.
There's something clear had that made it feel modern, familiar and boring (which might not be for everyone) 90% of my tasks were in vscode devcontainers so kept things simple and out of the system for the most part.
etaioinshrdlu
Sounds like bloat removal and minimalism.
kachapopopow
I was running this for a long time, only ever had a single crash from a live kernel update in 4 years that I had it on 3 AMD epyc servers.
esseph
This is both a neat anecdote, and also funny with the Epyc punchline at the end ;)
mrbluecoat
My prediction is a handful of laid off employees will fork the repo and resurrect within a month with new branding.
ThinkBeat
Hopefully. But if Intel were paying them to do so, doing it for free without secure financial backing might not be appealing. I do hope you are right.
nosioptar
Similar happened when Mandriva went under and Mageia started about 15ish years ago.
Mageia is my favorite of the Mandrake descendants.
> Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS
If you've ever wondered how to lose all trust from your user base, it's the words effective immediately.
People need time to move and this basically gives users until the first vulnerability. Thanks Intel.