Clear Linux OS is a

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

distribution, developed and maintained on

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

's 01.org open-source platform, and optimized for Intel's microprocessors with an emphasis on performance and security. Its optimizations also affect AMD-systems. Clear Linux OS follows a

rolling release Rolling release, also known as rolling update or continuous delivery, is a concept in software development of frequently delivering updates to applications. This is in contrast to a ''standard'' or '' point release'' development model which uses s ...

model. Clear Linux OS is not intended to be a general-purpose Linux distribution; it is designed to be used by IT professionals for

DevOps DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (''Dev'') and IT operations (''Ops''). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary to ...

, AI application development,

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...

, and

container A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping. Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. The term ...

History

In 2015, Intel introduced ''Clear Linux OS'' at OpenStack Summit 2015, Vancouver initially, it was limited to cloud usage. Intel began the ''Clear Containers'' project to address

security. In 2015, originally, ''Clear Linux OS'' was deployed as a single monolithic unit. In May 2019, Clear Linux OS released a new Desktop Installer and started a Help Forum. ''Clear Linux OS'' is available via Microsoft Azure marketplace, and

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

marketplace.

Requirements

Clear Linux OS supports 2nd generation

Intel Core Intel Core is a line of streamlined midrange consumer, workstation and enthusiast computer central processing units (CPUs) marketed by Intel Corporation. These processors displaced the existing mid- to high-end Pentium processors at the time o ...

(

Sandy Bridge Sandy Bridge is the codename for Intel's 32 nm microarchitecture used in the second generation of the Intel Core processors (Core i7, i5, i3). The Sandy Bridge microarchitecture is the successor to Nehalem and Westmere microarchitecture. ...

) CPUs and later,

Xeon E3 Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same ar ...

and later, and

Silvermont Silvermont is a microarchitecture for low-power Atom, Celeron and Pentium branded processors used in systems on a chip (SoCs) made by Intel. Silvermont forms the basis for a total of four SoC families: * ''Merrifield'' and ''Moorefield'' cons ...

-based Intel Atom C2000 and E3800 processors. An installed system is booted via the EFI boot loader or via systemd-boot. Minimum system requirements are SSE4 and

CLMUL Carry-less Multiplication (CLMUL) is an extension to the x86 instruction set used by microprocessors from Intel and AMD which was proposed by Intel in March 2008 and made available in the Intel Westmere processors announced in early 2010. Mathema ...

( carry-less multiplication), as well as

UEFI UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is a set of specifications written by the UEFI Forum. They define the architecture of the platform firmware used for booting and its interface for interaction with the operating system. Examples of ...

Features

Clear Linux OS uses reference stacks to install images that are optimized and tested together for specific use-cases. It also utilizes a strict separation between User data and System config files, called ''stateless'', so that even a misconfigured system will still boot correctly and then perform a factory reset so it can be reconfigured.

Desktop

By default, Clear Linux OS ships with the GNOME desktop environment, but instead of Wayland it uses

X11 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

and most graphical effects are disabled. KDE Plasma and Xfce are also available for installation. It is possible to manually enable Wayland.

Package management

Packages are usually installed and updated through bundles with the help of swupd, which is described as an ''OS-level software update program'', using delta updates to minimize update size.

Flatpak Flatpak, formerly known as xdg-app, is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. It is advertised as offering a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system. ...

is also preinstalled and can be used to install and use packages. Mixer is the tool for creating 3rd-party-bundles, which can then be installed using swupd.

Competitors

For containers: *

Fedora CoreOS Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. Fedora contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of open-source technologies. Fedora is the upstream sou ...

RancherOS The Spanish and Mexican governments made many concessions and land grants in Alta California (now known as California) and Baja California from 1775 to 1846. The Spanish Concessions of land were made to retired soldiers as an inducement for t ...

* Snappy Ubuntu Core *

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

Project Photon OS *

SmartOS SmartOS is a free and open-source SVR4 hypervisor based on the UNIX operating system that combines OpenSolaris technology with Linux's KVM virtualization. Its core kernel contributed to the illumos project. It features several technologies: C ...

* ResinOS * openSUSE MicroOS * Bare Metal Container

Name

''Clear Linux'' was referred to in early documentation as ''Clear Linux OS'', later as ''Clear Linux* OS'' with a corresponding footnote acknowledging that the rights to "

" may be possessed by others. ''Clear Linux OS'' has been referred to, in the literature, as ''Clear Linux OS'', ''Clear Linux* OS'', ''Clear Linux OS'', ''Clear Linux*'', ''Clear Linux''.

References

External links

* * {{Linux distributions Enterprise Linux distributions Independent Linux distributions Linux distributions Rolling Release Linux distributions X86-64 Linux distributions