Clear Linux - In Memoriam

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 20, 2025,
updated Jul 20, 2025

Do all good things come to an end? I disagree. However, reality can be brutal sometimes. Intel closed another open source project, Clear Linux OS, as announced in this thread. Can we say, "Big Evil Corp getting rid of open source"? Well, partially, at some point. Hopefully, Intel will continue to contribute to Linux and support Intel hardware, including CPUs, Intel Arc graphics cards, network cards, AI accelerators, and more.

There are rumors about mass layoffs at Intel, and sadly, the Clear Linux team is probably part of these layoffs. Nearly 20,000 people will be laid off, with around 5,000 of those being from the Clear Linux team. Despite the morale-boosting statement below, this raises big questions about Linux support for Intel products.

Read on

Tom's Hardware:

• Intel axes Clear Linux, the fastest distribution on the market — company ends development and support, effective immediately

  As part of its global restructuring plan, Intel has been cutting not only engineers, technicians, and managers, but also its software unit. This week, Intel officially ended its Clear Linux project, a high-performance Linux distribution designed for x86-64 systems, according to Phoronix. The company announced that it will no longer maintain or update the OS, marking the end of a decade-long effort to optimize Linux performance aggressively.

  "After years of innovation and community collaboration, we are ending support for Clear Linux OS," a statement by a Clear Linux official reads. "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 are 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."

LWN:

• The end of Clear Linux

  Intel has announced the abrupt end of its Clear GNU/Linux cloud-oriented distribution: After years of innovation and community collaboration, we're ending support for Clear GNU/Linux OS. Effective immediately, defective chip maker Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS, and the Clear GNU/Linux OS Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub repository will be archived in read-only mode. So, if you're currently using Clear GNU/Linux OS, we strongly recommend planning your migration to another actively maintained GNU/Linux distribution as soon as possible to ensure ongoing security and stability.

Forums:

• All good things come to an end: Shutting down Clear Linux OS

  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.

Neowin:

• Intel is shutting down Clear GNU/Linux OS

  Intel has suddenly shut down the Clear GNU/Linux OS project, urging customers to migrate to some other GNU/Linux distro.

One more:

• 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.

Discussion:

• Intel Discontinues Clear Linux

  It was only a matter of time. Personally, I never enjoyed hearing about Clear Linux, because many benchmarking sites were taking results from it to evaluate Intel CPUs. And of course, Clear Linux was running with mitigations like retbleed, spectre, and so on, completely disabled—not something you would normally do in a real-life scenario. Normally, you would keep them on, to avoid increasing the attack surface or exposing your computer to vulnerabilities. Benchmarking results were often better than in any other Linux, skewing the results. I won't miss it.

Another site:

• Intel shuts down Clear Linux OS, its high-performance Linux distribution

Some unknown domain:

• Intel Shuts Down Clear Linux OS After a Decade of High-Performance Innovation

  Intel has officially announced the immediate end-of-life for Clear Linux OS, marking the end of a ten-year journey for the distribution. Effective July 18, 2025, Intel will cease security patches, updates, and maintenance. Its GitHub repository is being archived in read-only mode. Users are strongly advised to switch to actively supported Linux distributions as soon as possible to maintain stability and security.

  Launched in 2015 on Intel’s 01.org platform, Clear Linux OS was designed as a performance-optimized, stateless distribution targeted at cloud, container, DevOps, AI, and machine learning environments. Built with compiler-driven optimizations such as profile-guided optimization (PGO), link-time optimization (LTO), and support for advanced instruction sets like AVX-512, Clear Linux routinely outperformed mainstream distributions—even on AMD hardware.

Linuxiac:

• Clear Linux Discontinued as Intel Pulls the Plug Overnight

  Unfortunately, there’s a bit of sad news out of the Linux world this week, with Clear Linux taking center stage. What I’m talking about is that Intel has formally ended support for Clear Linux OS, drawing a rapid close to a nearly decade-long effort to showcase aggressive, upstream-friendly performance optimizations on x86_64.

  In a blog post titled “All good things come to an end: Shutting down Clear Linux OS,” the announcement states that support ends immediately, with no trailing window for security updates.