r/linux • u/MMORPGDev • 11h ago
Distro News Former Intel Engineer Who Was One Of The Clear Linux Architects Is Starting A New Distro
https://www.phoronix.com/news/The-Ur-Project94
u/ship__ 10h ago
This article is written like complete ass, could it not be passed through a grammar checker like once? Guess it's more likely to be written by a human at least
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u/luckiestredditor 8h ago
before the age of AI, we used to have human slop
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u/General_Problem5199 8h ago
Oh the good old days when they needed content mills to churn out massive amounts of shitty content.
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u/Crashman09 6h ago
It kept economic viability a factor in mass producing slop.
Now that isn't the case
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u/DesiOtaku 7h ago
This new initiative, named The Ur Project, is highly leveraging Rust and will rely on AI/LLMs in part and aims to incorporate some design improvements Clear Linux.
So an LLM generated distro; not sure if I want anything mission critical working on that.
"The goal for this project is to build a mature Linux Distribution building software stack that allows users and companies to build their own secure distro, and share in a distributed way whatever parts they want to share or borrow from each other.
Biggest problem that is preventing me from making my own distro (actually, I need to make my on "spin") is the lack of documentation. If Fedora or Ubuntu gave better documentation on how to make my own redistributable spin, I would have made it years ago.
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u/Wb9VBScxu2uZJHeq2E3W 3h ago
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u/DesiOtaku 2h ago
Sadly something image based (where changes to root doesn't get saved after reboot) can't work; at least, not in my situation.
What I really need is something based off either Fedora KDE or Kubuntu that would install a few extra packages, have a certain configuration, and then run a special configure app. Yes, it sounds crazy to make a spin just for that but imagine having to do that on 50+ PCs and you will see why I am interested.
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u/blackcain GNOME Team 1h ago
I already reached out to him about that actually. Maybe I can get Arjan to join up too. :D
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u/MarcDarcy 11h ago
Welcome to the party! Having said that, I'm happy with my current distro.
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u/blackcain GNOME Team 1h ago
That's what I say when Mormons and other christian people come to my door.
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u/s0f4r 1h ago
Hi folks I'm the guy from the article.
I love all the posts. Everyone posting both positive, neutral or negative opinions is right. I myself hesitate to put into words why exactly am I doing this, and I so do realize that there's going to be overlap with other projects.
One of the best things we can do is keep each other honest. Shoot your criticism. I read everything, including all the sarcasm and headhots. If we can't take criticism we're no better than anyone else who avoids the exposure.
Stay tuned as I frantically attempt to argue myself through a maze of bad reasons :)
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u/markand67 10h ago
When I started Linux back in 2003 there were already too many distros. Now people create arch "derivates" just to provide a default pre-configured desktop.
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u/TheCreepyPL 10h ago
Why couldn't he contribute to another though? There is already so many distros, I know that this is open source and all, but if everybody would create their own stuff or just forks, nobody would contribute to anybody else.
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10h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/TheCreepyPL 10h ago
I really don't want to argue about this, because after all, everybody does what they want and that's fine. All I'm saying is that the goal of this new distro, does sound a bit like the goals of a few other distros.
People/companies who already use RHELL or Alpine (for example), are less likely to switch a another distro. And for those that will switch, they'll be less likely to contribute to already existing distros, so the trend of creating more mainstream distros leads only to fragmentation among the community, and less development overall.
Wouldn't it be better to have more people working on a lesser amount of distros, to have a smaller amount that work slightly better, than a bigger amount that work slightly worse?
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u/Dr_Hexagon 10h ago
there's nothing in there to explain why this can't just be a set of defaults for Arch or NixOS
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u/TheCreepyPL 10h ago
There should be some middle ground of course, but in terms of distros, I would say that this has been achieved a long time ago.
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u/Specialist-Dog-501 7h ago
Not judging here- just regarding what this distro creator aims for, article says ".. I feel was the biggest "sin" of Clear Linux OS, was that we made it way too hard for the community to contribute. Like, easily defensible it was silly difficult to have normal, healthy software development integration flows, do iterative development, and to have a quick and easy way to test your own code changes."
Sounds like he/them just aim to include a larger user base earlier in the process this time.
But again, I guess every distro creator wants that- and it's chicken-egg thing- "nothing to show- no one joins- no one joins - nothing to show", they all have this bootstrap problem.I am with you and a clear, simple selling point is probably the best strategy to quickly gather a community- simple, clear ideas gather fans quickly, that's nothing new with humanity. But simple ideas are the hardest one..
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u/FlamingoEarringo 10h ago
Meh another distro
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u/I-AM-MEATS 10h ago
I’d just be happy with something that’s not a gui slapped on top of an existing distro. All these spins just fragment the ecosystem, screw with standardisation and confuse new users.
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u/johncate73 7h ago
If you don't want "fragmentation" and want an "ecosystem," then use Windows. Linux is what it is, and by its very nature, it will always be the Wild West of operating systems.
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u/I-AM-MEATS 2h ago
Which will always hurt its wider end user adoption rates. In the nix sphere this is where Apple and Google at least succeed in.
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u/Artichoke808 8h ago
Take a spin on aerynOS. Built from the ground up.
https://aerynos.com/blog/2026/08/31/a-community-that-works-together-builds-together/
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u/dcheesi 11h ago
their legendary Clear Linux
so legendary that I'd never heard of it
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u/stevecrox0914 10h ago
Everything was built with compiler options set for the latest Intel hardware, Phoronix would always include it in benchmarks and it was interesting how those options affected things.
MeeGo was a grand operating system, but Nokia had a working Linux distribution and while integrating with Intels Moblin did lead to the MeeGo desktop I loved.. it added a 2 year delay. I think the Nokia N9 iPhone competitor would have existed in 2008 and not 2010.
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u/DesiOtaku 6h ago
The whole delay was for getting everybody on board on how to handle Qt Quick Controls; only for everybody to decide to do their own thing. If QML / Qt Quick had proper controls back in 2008 with proper styling, then both the Intel and Nokia version of MeeGo would have not only released earlier, but would have had a lot less headaches to develop for.
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u/Hadi_Chokr07 10h ago
It was literally the fastest distro and had the best kernel patches.
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u/steamcho1 4h ago
Maybe i am the weird one but choosing a distro for the kernel seems weird. One can install whatever kernel they want.
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u/Hadi_Chokr07 4h ago
That's not what I said. They developed them. Cachy later also adopted them etc.
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u/Takashi_malibu 10h ago
Honestly if you never heard of it then I am gonna say thats on you. "Legendary", that's overhype. Honestly I don't know about this former employees coming to linux to build AI assisted stuff. like the task manager guy. But I love the migration to linux.
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u/kansetsupanikku 7h ago
when the authors read this comment, they sure will regret not informing you personally /s
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 10h ago
You’re probably fairly new to Linux then, right?
Interest in it started to decline in around 2020
The "legendary" time was from like 2015-20207
u/RunOrBike 10h ago
Im an old one, using Linux since 1998. Still, never heard of it. Or I just don’t remember, quite possible, too.
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u/silenceimpaired 10h ago
I roughly remember it… It did something novel… can’t recall what. Legendary in innovation, not popularity.
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u/proton_badger 2h ago
It was a distro means to demonstrate what could be done and push further, not a mass market distro at all. It was often used as the reference for performance.
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u/dcheesi 10h ago
Nope, been using Linux since the Slackware days in the mid '90s.
If anything, I'm probably too old and grumpy to have been paying attention to the latest bleeding edge distros by that time
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u/kansetsupanikku 7h ago
what were you paying attention to? the engineering effort behind Clear Linux was pretty meaningful, many patches from there landing upstream in glibc, gcc, and more
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u/ClubPuzzleheaded8514 9h ago edited 8h ago
This word is a bit exagerated, but Clear was the fastest distro ever. Even faster than CachyOS.
And Clear was killed in 4 weeks by Intel. even the repos were deleted .
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u/Kevin_Kofler 10h ago
A distro "heavily leveraging" Rust, AI, and LLMs. Thanks, but no thanks, I will pass on that one.
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u/ruby_R53 10h ago
agree, tho' i do think it'd be interesting to see a distro be almost entirely written in Rust just to have something different
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u/gartstell 6h ago
The truth is that Clear Linux was a marvel.
I installed it out of curiosity and ended up keeping it as my daily driver distribution for several years. Yes, setting up the printer involved reading and reworking a script and things like that, but in return you got very noticeable performance in daily use, it was tremendously stable, and the "rollback of the last update" system seemed very useful to me. It was also the first time I had a stateless distro (it's striking to see /etc empty for the first time!).
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u/reaper987 10h ago
Is there a big prize for whoever creates one millionth/billionth distro? Otherwise I don't see the point in having so many of them.
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u/binocry_ 10h ago
I'd rather he continue developing meego than create yet another linux desktop distro
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u/ThunderousHazard 10h ago
Why Does Every Word Need To Begin With Uppercase Letters?
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u/funforgiven 10h ago
It's just a stylistic choice for the headline. Capitalizing every word isn't standard title case, but it’s not unusual.
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u/amroamroamro 9h ago
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u/ThunderousHazard 8h ago edited 1h ago
Did you even read it before posting?
When using title case, all words are capitalized, except for minor words (typically articles), short prepositions, and some conjunctions)) that are not the first or last word of the title.
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u/Defiant-Rip-1897 9h ago
Not sure on the longevity of it, but I like how it has a very Gnome 2.0 aesthetic.
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u/mdins1980 33m ago
Best of luck, but I am sticking with Slackware on the desktop machines and Proxmox or Debian for my servers.
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u/AlienPet13 10m ago
Great, that's just what we need... more linux distros, because we certainly don't have enough of those! /s
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u/Bussio28Team 6h ago
This is pretty cool. Clear Linux always had some interesting ideas, especially around performance and optimization. Curious to see what he builds when he’s no longer tied to Intel’s roadmap. Definitely one to keep an eye on. 👀
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u/FlukyS 10h ago
It'd be much better if those people got involved with a different distro like CachyOS instead
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u/ShaderCompilation 10h ago edited 9h ago
"It would have been much better if those people got involved with a different distro like Ubuntu instead(of creating CachyOs)"
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u/SlingingTriceps 10h ago
In that particular case it just happens that Canonical is run by a complete nut job
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u/FlukyS 10h ago
Well CachyOS has a completely different approach:
- Rolling distro instead of point releases
- Compiling packages for different architectures specifically to make the most use out of the differences between CPUs
- More aggressive tuning but a very iterative approach
The reason why I said CachyOS specifically is while Clear Linux was around and optimised specifically for Intel CPUs CachyOS already was beating it for performance. I'd assume joining forces with the distro that is already ahead is a better option than making a new one and competing in an already crowed market. Of course the Clear Linux people would be useful for RedHat or Canonical to pick up with their experience tuning a distro so they could join Ubuntu or Fedora sure but I was suggesting CachyOS for a reason.
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u/oishishou 10h ago
By that reasoning he should just go straight to Gentoo
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u/FlukyS 9h ago
Well Gentoo has that advantage but at least with CachyOS you are getting premade packages rather than compiling them yourself. The compiled packages for CachyOS are x86-64-v3, x86-64-v4 and Zen 4/5. The reason why that matters is -v3 and v4 have some differences like adding AVX512 support, Zen4/5 have AVX512 and also a bunch more extensions. Compilers know these are available but most distro packages don't use them which isn't horrible in that they can do other instructions but at a small performance cost. Gentoo you will in theory (as long as you do the right things with the compiler flags and stuff) will do similar but then you run into the issue that you are compiling everything yourself.
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u/ThatResort 10h ago
This is gonna change everything as we know it so dramatically it won't ever be the same again.
I really have no strong feelings one way or the other about people creating new distros, but I can't help to ask myself why. What's the point? What was the problem leading to the path for another distribution? To this day, I still think they huge missing distro is the one for the average desktop user who's relying on Windows ($) or macOS ($$$) and just wants an experience in between Windows and Android in terms of administration and user-friendliness. I would never want something like that for myself, but I can tell most people I know (who're not control freaks like me) would love it.
Feel free to open my eyes.
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u/brrrrreaker 10h ago
it'll have the lifecycle of any other intel product, 3 months work, then abandonware