I’ve ready that is a nice and very advanced OS. I run a dell laptop with Intel processor, so I was thinking of checking it out.I did a live disc and it felt like every other version of gnome… Though there are probably many¹ features im not aware of. So what and who is this distro for. Me running Intel drivers, processor, CPU, would it me to make the swap?
Actually, they aren’t many features, and that’s one of the main drawbacks. Clear Linux isn’t really meant for a general-purpose daily-driver (of course, nothing actually preventing you from doing so, like most Linuxes). It’s mainly aimed at DevOps stuff, AI development, cloud computing, container usage etc.
Speed is it’s main selling point, but it’s speed mainly comes from it’s default packages compiled with extensions such as AVX512 and applying other Intel-processor optimisations. Which means third-party applications won’t get that much of a benefit. It wins synthetic benchmarks and overall the OS feels snappy, but you can get that snappy feel by using a custom kernel like Xanmod on your existing distro.
And here’s the main catch - the package manager sucks, and there’s very few packages in the default repos. You need to compile a lot of stuff, like codecs, if you want to use it as a daily driver. It does have Flatpak, but again, if you use Flatpak packages then you’d be missing out on all the optimisations.
I guess if microarch optimization is it’s main selling point, we can go with Gentoo instead.
While it does requires tech knowledge, if one looks for such optimization, chances are they’re tech savy enough.