Saturday, July 19th 2025

Intel Shuts Down "Clear Linux" Distribution Development
Linux enthusiasts gather to hear the latest news: Intel is officially shutting down its Clear Linux distribution after ten years of development and optimizations. As many recall, Clear Linux is an Intel-optimized Linux distribution that serves as a high-performance, optimized OS designed to extract every last ounce of performance from Intel hardware, especially Intel Xeons. As software optimizations, such as AVX-512, became more common, Intel consistently pushed these optimizations and specific pre-compiled software with compiler flags and kernel optimizations that increased performance on Intel and even AMD CPUs by a few percents. Traditional Linux distributions weren't optimized in that regard as they were mostly compiled to run on every x86 or Arm CPU, without any special flags raised for performance. This has enabled compatibility, but lacks a few percentage points of performance that Clear Linux managed to extract. As of now, these efforts are essentially terminated, and the distribution will cease to receive security and quality of life improvements, effective immediately. Users are advised to switch to another distribution. The complete statement follows.
Sources:
Clear Linux Community, via Phoronix
arjan (Clear Linux Developer)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.
19 Comments on Intel Shuts Down "Clear Linux" Distribution Development
Anyway…
Yeah-yeah, technically a low quality post, but what can you even say to a nothingburger like this? I don’t remember the last time anyone even talked about CL, let alone actually ran it for any serious purpose.
When was the last time they entered a new market and found success, rather than flounder for 3-10 years and then give up.
The "not used by anyone" metric is a skewed one IMO since it's not really meant to be used as a daily driver distribution nor is it a stable server one. It was, however, a high performance compute focused distribution and I'm sad to see it discontinued. I hope that despite this Intel won't stop focusing on performance optimizations in open source projects.
I'll not bother arguing about performance improvements. Quite often I read only improvements in teh range of 3%. It's up to discussion. A bad setup of linux mint will cost much more for the disk space and speed and download size. I will only compare it to linux mint. It was the most used distro on other laptops in the past 30 years here.
I consider 10 year distro a student project. Nothing in common with slackware were I started. Suse, ...
There were also substantial kernel config tweaks, not just compiler flags.
Be nice if there was a true windows OS competitor..............
It’s also bad for Intel in a way. When they now want to demonstrate some new feature, ISA extension, whatever, to the world, they would anyways either need to host a fork of some other distro, or go begging that other distro to incorporate their changes upstream, for people of the public to look at.
It seems dumb. Phoronix has hosted numerous Clear Linux comparisons over the years, I guess it’s been a staple, even, and that whole recognition and awareness has now been thrown out with the bathwater.
So, no, I don’t have numbers, but it does not seem like a smart choice to me on the face of it. Of course, if they’ve had to staff a couple dozen capable people for bare maintenane of packages, those might make up for it by improving GPU drivers and their software package in general, of course. Maybe we’ll see more collaboration with other projects fed from the resources now freed?! Who knows!
I’d like to thank everyone who has provided debunking to this audience’s preconceptions. :) From what I’ve taken note of myself over the years, it really wasn’t bad, the people who had some use for it, generally knew about it and used it or refereenced it where appropriate. It was never set up to bring about The Age of the Linux Desktop. ;)
You the consumer will need to do your own optimisations to better suit the hardware, intel did it for you