Clear Linux 31530

Just as he was settling into the new Fedora release, Mayank Sharma thinks he’s found a suitable replacement.

- Mayank Sharma

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.