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# Blogs & News

Power and Performance

# A Linux* OS for Linux Developers

Ianeta Hutchinson

14 May, 2019

The Clear Linux* OS team set out to build a Linux OS with the best performance possible on Intel® Architecture. Naturally, we wanted to streamline our development. We started chipping away at a development environment where the user experience is tailored towards Linux developers, one daily release at a time. Early adopters have already provided us valuable user experience input influencing us to provide new images, an updated installer, software store, and forum to better connect to our community. We need your continued input to help make the Clear Linux OS ideal for your development needs.

What we have to offer:

Streamlined development tools and workflows. We leverage open source, cross-platform technologies and bundle content to get developers to productivity faster. Our `basic` bundles are curated to provide all the relevant developer tools that can be added in one command - `c-basic` for developing in C, and `containers-basic` for container use-cases. Community feedback helps us to keep improving our use-case specific bundles while we also make more granular bundles available as requested.

Getting back to a known good state is effortless for Clear Linux developers. Because the Clear Linux OS employs a stateless design concept, developers avoid losing time resolving conflicts between OS, user, and system configurations by tracking different classes of configurations in different locations. A factory reset is as easy as deleting `/etc` and `/var` repositories and rebooting.

We’re also eliminating the need to context-switch while debugging. The online FUSE debug system is a developer-centered feature that dynamically pulls debug info throughout a debug session. This means Clear Linux developers don’t have to hunt down and install additional packages to debug. We’re looking to improve this experience further with your feedback!

The ability to compile fast code, fast. For a distro looking to serve developers who pump out optimized code, being on the latest compiler is an absolute necessity. We’re currently running GCC9 and are poised to move to GCC10 as soon as it becomes available. The Clear Linux OS has always been very aggressive with applying compiler flags to optimize builds and we look forward to continuing this trend. We’ll also continue with our multiple-build approach so that those who aren’t flying with Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) optimizations, are still getting bang for their Intel® AVX2 buck.

Stays in lockstep with upstream. Clear Linux OS’s rolling release allows us to ensure that security mitigations that are available are included in the next release without any unreasonable delay. This vigilance on security together with a foundation of proven performance allows for a substantial head start to building a performant product. The Clear Linux OS stays close to the upstream kernel, incorporating commits that enable Intel® CPU features without delay, and the optimized libraries included in our Clear Linux distro have contributed towards notable performance results.

Try us out!

If you are using a desktop, we provide a multitude of desktop options to choose from to suit your needs. We currently ship the GNOME desktop by default, Plasma, and XFCE desktop environments as well as having LXQt, Awesome, and i3 also available. We chose not to lock developers into one desktop option so that you’re able to combine different desktop tools for greater flexibility and customization options.

Check out our new website where we’ve added a specific area for developers. We are excited to hear your input in helping us enable more Linux developers to create superior code.

1 FTC Optimization Notice: Optimization Notice: Intel's compilers may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3 instruction sets and other optimizations. Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel. Microprocessor-dependent optimizations in this product are intended for use with Intel microprocessors. Certain optimizations not specific to Intel microarchitecture are reserved for Intel microprocessors. Please refer to the applicable product User and Reference Guides for more information regarding the specific instruction sets covered by this notice. Notice Revision #20110804

2 Intel technologies’ features and benefits depend on system configuration and may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. Learn more at intel.com, or from the OEM or retailer. No product or component can be absolutely secure.