JohnTHaller 20 hours ago

For background: This was Intel's distro and it's likely that most/all of the folks that were maintaining it are a part of the 5,000 layoffs just announced, bringing the total Intel layoffs to 20,000 people.

Havoc 21 hours ago

>Effective immediately,

>we strongly recommend planning your migration

Not even a brief period of advance notice to do a migration? Just one day no more security patches...

wth is going on over at intel

  • benoau 20 hours ago

    > wth is going on over at intel

    Thousands of layoffs. It's surprising someone even had time to post the notice.

    • fsckboy 19 hours ago

      no, the message poster keeps his job, so expect more messages

      • burnt-resistor 18 hours ago

        Round after round of layoffs is terrible for morale and drives away existing good talent. Layoffs should cut deep... once. Corporations these days are rehashing the unwise, bureaucratic stupidity of decades past.

        • binary132 6 hours ago

          They don’t want to retain good (costly) talent. They want to shed the costly talent and acquire cheap talent.

        • DebtDeflation 18 hours ago

          Layoffs have just become a way to manage quarterly EPS.

          • burnt-resistor 17 hours ago

            Yep. Wage suppression and insta stock bump. Publicly- and private equity-owned corporations are inherently unstable beasts. Knowledge workers and ordinary workers need to band together and start their own co-ops that stay private, partially collectively-owned, have retirement plans, high performance people, pride in their goods and services, high job satisfaction, and very low turnover because everyone is trying to join them.

  • Bluestein 19 hours ago

    Intel. The Nvidia of the 90's. Oh success, you fickle fickle bride.-

  • curt15 21 hours ago

    How much notice did ppl get when sacked?

    • nine_k 20 hours ago

      From my experience, none. "Utterly unfortunately, today was your last day with the company. A separation agreement has been sent to your personal email. Your corporate access is being revoked. Thank you for your contribution!"

      Being fired for poor performance is all about ample warnings, issuing a PIP, etc. The company wants the employee back on track. Being laid off is a situation that an employee cannot fix with their efforts. There's no incentive to work this week if it is already known that you are going to be laid off next week, but some employees might consider a prank or even minor sabotage as a helpless act of protest. It's safest to dismiss the laid-off ASAP.

      • binary132 6 hours ago

        PIP is not “wants the employee back on track”. It’s “documentation of a performance problem and good faith attempt at remedy to justify firing”.

      • dontlaugh 18 hours ago

        It’s also not legal in much of the world to do that, thankfully. There’s weeks/months to negotiate collectively with the company, possibly organise a strike with those not at risk of redundancy or even just to say goodbye to coworkers.

        • nine_k 16 hours ago

          This works if you have a trade union. I'd hazard to say that at least 99% of software engineers in the US work on "at-will" employment agreements, and do not belong to any unions.

          A separation agreement usually stipulates paying 2-3 months worth of salary, and extending the benefits similarly. I don't see how it is worse than spending a couple of extra weeks in the office, and receiving the same.

          (Also note that employees that are harder to lay off also get hired with much more reluctance.)

      • KennyBlanken 19 hours ago

        "Employees might sabotage stuff" is something parroted constantly and there's never any proof it is a significant issue.

        • kijiki 18 hours ago

          It's not common, but it absolutely happens: https://www.courthousenews.com/man-behind-s-f-system-lockout...

          Early in my career in the mid 2000s, the startup that was on the same floor as mine laid off a QA person, who then showed up the next day and fatally shot the CEO and head of HR. Our CEO called me and told me not to come in that day.

        • kemotep 18 hours ago

          This[0] is just the first result searching and it is from this week too. But it is not uncommon. Insider threats to infrastructure exist at all times of course but a disgruntled employee with administrative access and knowledge of the infrastructure can do a lot of damage quickly.

          [0]: https://flaglerlive.com/it-attack-firing/

        • _alternator_ 19 hours ago

          A single person can cause a lot of damage.

    • shawn_w 20 hours ago

      A week, maybe 2 for this last round? They were announced on the 13th I believe, for "mid July" layoffs.

    • fsckboy 19 hours ago

      hopefully no notice. employed people need to maintain savings for a rainy day in case they are suddenly unable to work, which can happen for any number of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with the company.

      telling struggling companies that they need to keep savings around so they can pay a bunch of employees when the company already knows that nothing will come of that work is silly.

      you can keep money in the left pocket or the right pocket, it's the same amount of money. But saying "keep double money in both pockets" makes no sense, it's inefficient. money is not easy to come by. because companies operate at a larger scale, over many employees, it seems like they have money all over the place, but most company are capital constrained all the time. (companies that are not capital constrained often pursue foolish ideas, too much expansion, etc.)

      it's just a question of what the social contract is, and making the social contract be "employees can be as irresponsible as they want, somebody else will take care of it" sets a bad standard. Employers would rather hire responsible employees, and being responsible to yourself and your family is step one; and without regard to what employers want, it will make you a better person.

      • briansteffens 19 hours ago

        Maybe it's time for me to stop using this website

      • dontlaugh 18 hours ago

        I rarely resort to this sort of comment online, but I feel it is warranted in this case: fuck you.

        • fsckboy 17 hours ago

          you seem angry

          • binary132 6 hours ago

            you seem to be posting bait.

      • AlotOfReading 18 hours ago

            but most company are capital constrained all the time.
        
        Most employees are capital constrained at all times. The median American has $8000 in savings, and 30% have <$500.
        • fsckboy 17 hours ago

          if your goal is healthy companies that can hire employees and give the employees what employees want (jobs, if you got lost) then don't saddle companies with extra expenses that are not productive. giving employees a bonus for non productive activity on top of the company's failure is just stupid.

          if immigrants with menial jobs can save money and even send money back home to their families, so can higher status employees.

      • Zone3513 18 hours ago

        Why won't someone think of the poor struggling companies!!

hardwaresofton 21 hours ago

Knowing which projects/languages/frameworks to invest time into and which to skip (even if they produce useful subprojects) is a superpower these days.

  • lispisok 20 hours ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

    "a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age."

    • hardwaresofton 19 hours ago

      Sure, but the counter is that you're going to be very late to some new foundational tech (ex. Kubernetes) that are legitimately useful. There are benefits to being early to a trend that has legs

      • binary132 6 hours ago

        There’s nothing wrong with getting involved in things that seem like they might be interesting without counting on their long-term survival. Hype-chasing on the other hand tends to be a bad plan.

  • kev009 20 hours ago

    Debian, FreeBSD.. the longstanding community software is immune from these kinds of rug pulls.

    • mikepurvis 20 hours ago

      Yes, but you pay a real cost for those choices too. A management plane that is non deterministic, imperative, and full of highly mutable state, not to mention basic stuff like the package manager metadata and cache not being shareable, and package installs all having to be serialized because they all call shell scripts as root. These limitations constrain even tools like dagger from providing a first class interface to apt like there is for apk because any deb could have rm -rf / as the postinstall script.

      A lot of normal users don’t feel these pain points or tolerate them by sidestepping the whole affair with containers or VM images. But if you’re in a position where these things have an impact it can be extremely motivating to seek out others who are willing to experiment with different ways of doing things.

      • zymhan 20 hours ago

        I'll bet $20 your solution to the problems you posed is "Nix"

        • mikepurvis 19 hours ago

          I did indeed deploy Nix to moderate success in a prior gig, but have held back pushing it at my current one; we're simply not at the scale where the problems that Nix solves are worth the cost (yet, maybe ever).

          For a less controversial take, consider alpine's apk package manager. For a single-use container that runs one utility in an early dockerfile stage, apk can probably produce that image in 2-3 seconds, whereas for an apt-based container it's more like 30 seconds. That may not matter in the grand scheme of things or with layer caching or whatever, but sometimes it really does.

        • hardwaresofton 19 hours ago

          I’m assuming a friendly tone here, and in a similar tone its funny because I also think Nix is not adopted because its benefits just aren't worth the cost to users (devs)

  • TrevorFSmith 19 hours ago

    A good start would be to distrust anything made by a VC funded start-up or a once-great tech co. If you do want to use something they made, create a hard fork and pretend they already ditched the project as they inevitably will.

    • hardwaresofton 19 hours ago

      sure but this approach is limited, ChatGPT would have failed this test.

  • rdl 20 hours ago

    Always bet against Intel whenever it's something software?

    • avazhi 20 hours ago

      Intel will probably be somebody’s subsidiary for less than $150B sometime within the next 3 years, pending DOJ approval.

      Company is absolutely cooked.

      • Sunspark 20 hours ago

        $150B is pretty cheap if it comes with ready-to-go chip fabs.

        • mbreese 19 hours ago

          I’d expect the fabs to get spun off at some point a la AMD/GlobalFoundries.

          • mepian 6 hours ago

            AMD/GF spin-off was backed by Saudi money, who is going to pay this time?

        • RantyDave 15 hours ago

          You have to remember it comes with a phenomenal debt load.

      • dehrmann 14 hours ago

        There's enough value still there...

        If you spit up chip design and fab, who would be interested in each? And is there enough x86 demand to keep the design side open? Windows on ARM is a thing, and data centers have been buying more from AMD than they used to.

    • WD-42 20 hours ago

      I dunno I feel like I see Intel bail out AMD on a lot of linux/x86 software stuff.

      • esseph 19 hours ago

        Intel is not even #1 in the datacenter for CPU anymore.

        Cooked

  • BLKNSLVR 19 hours ago

    Rule #1: Exclude those with corporate ownership or dependence.

    • hardwaresofton 19 hours ago

      Hard disagree here, corporations almost always have the biggest pockets to fund continued R&D.

      There’s a tension there, but this is why it’s a skill — theres no simple rule. Fully open source community governed projects can be some of the most obviously good to ignore.

    • binary132 6 hours ago

      Unmaintained free software is nearly as useless as corporate-sponsored OSS whose funding and support has disappeared

  • justinclift 20 hours ago

    Some are easy to see to avoid (ie Google, https://killedbygoogle.com), whereas others like this one are a bit more unexpected though make sense (to me) in hindsight.

    • happycube 18 hours ago

      Intel's graveyard, even before this year, is just about as big as Google's.

      • justinclift 16 hours ago

        Interesting, I didn't know that.

        Is there a list, like there is for Google?

  • gchamonlive 21 hours ago

    Also knowing when to give up and not get dragged into the sunk ship cost

  • imiric 20 hours ago

    It's not that difficult. Choose boring over trendy. Simple over complex. Stability and quality over speed and quantity.

    There is a lot of software that fits and optimizes for the former. Just be smart and selective about your choices, and avoid compromising.

    • hardwaresofton 19 hours ago

      It's not that simple actually -- this kind of thinking might leave you working on mainframes in 2000 (or even now) which is obviously a mistake.

      It requires a certain taste. There's a skill involved.

      > Just be smart and selective about your choices, and avoid compromising.

      This is a very "draw the rest of the owl" kind of statement

      • imiric 12 hours ago

        Well, sure, but those weren't instructions. Just general guidelines to counter the claim that choosing safe technology requires superpowers. It is much simpler than that.

  • iwontberude 21 hours ago

    As soon as I saw it was a project by Intel I rolled my eyes and ignored it.

    • StableAlkyne 21 hours ago

      What's going on over at Intel anyway?

      This happened recently with Scitkit-Learn Intelex, which was a drop-in replacement for some parts of sklearn that was a bit faster. One day, the Intel channel on Conda just stopped working (and I learned that Anaconda loses the will to live when a random channel you installed one package from is unavailable) and another organization took over Sklearn Intelex.

      No communication could be found on Google connecting them to Intel (whose only news around the package was announcing the initial release a few years ago), you had to read the Git issue history to find people talking about the transfer.

      I still have no idea what even happened to their Conda channel after the sudden disappearance. The complete lack of communication just left a bad taste in my mouth...

      • esseph 19 hours ago

        Multiple, multiple, multiple rounds of mass firings. Check the news past couple of months.

        Also completely outsourced all marketing.

    • squarefoot 21 hours ago

      Is OpenCV still owned by Intel, or dependent by them (funding, engineers, etc)? There are many good distros out there, but to my knowledge OpenCV has no other FOSS alternative on par with it.

      • mikepurvis 20 hours ago

        Pretty sure Intel abandoned it like fifteen years ago, and then Willow Garage employed some of the people, now there’s an independent OpenCV Foundation.

        But I have no idea who’s actually paying the bills, behind the scenes.

    • toshinoriyagi 21 hours ago

      I mean, Clear Linux was the leader in the vast majority of Linux benchmarks, to my knowledge. So much so that even AMD used it in their advertised benchmarks for CPU releases because of the performance advantage.

      I think it was quite successful, and I doubt they are shuttering it because they don't see the value in it, but because of overall lackluster company performance and the new CEO cutting costs/the workforce aggressively.

      • nine_k 21 hours ago

        It being a Linux distro, I wonder how soon a viable fork will appear.

        • bjconlan 20 hours ago

          Fingers crossed. I probably just did my last fresh install of this a couple of days ago and my last swupd update now. You will be missed...

        • Sunspark 20 hours ago

          I don't think there will be one, a company would need to commit to salaried devs. What would the value-added proposition be for them that they can't get by using any other distro out there?

        • yjftsjthsd-h 17 hours ago

          The problem is that Clear Linux did a lot of tweaking in their packaging to get good performance, up to and including actual code patching IIRC, so it would be a nontrivial ongoing effort to continue that work.

      • yakz 19 hours ago

        As a user I found it to be pretty buggy; driver issues on Intel NUCs causing instability.

citizenpaul 20 hours ago

It's always interesting when a company announces that it has leadership in paycheck only.

We are bankrupt of direction or ideas. Was are going to make panic knee jerk decisons in a public view.

I guess to the ultra rich owner class it looks like work. Business idiots all around the MBA tree.

I have no stake in clearlinux future or past, just observing.

  • Bluestein 19 hours ago

    > leadership in paycheck only.

    With your leave I am borrowing this. Succinct yet so very descriptive.-

jauntywundrkind 18 hours ago

Ooof. What a stellar project. Alas.

I wonder how much this will affect Kata Containers, which is AFAIK like the best/only good way to run containers in k8s with the security of VMs? https://katacontainers.io/

Man. There's so much amazing work Intel has done for the ecosystem. It's so hard so scary to imagine this world where no one else fills in so so much, so unclear who else does. Intel has done so so much for the ecosystem. It feels like open source has been an Immortal phalanx, always people to fill in: I hope so much I'm wrong but this shift in Intel feels like the death of the Immortal. What a pity that CHIPS act turned to dust, left such an amazing crucial industry hang out to dry.

oliwarner 15 hours ago

> Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS

If you've ever wondered how to lose all trust from your user base, it's the words effective immediately.

People need time to move and this basically gives users until the first vulnerability. Thanks Intel.

etaioinshrdlu 21 hours ago

What optimizations did they do that had the biggest effect? can they be brought into the mainline linux kernel and distros?

  • ethan_smith 19 hours ago

    Clear Linux's performance came primarily from function multi-versioning (CPU-specific optimizations at runtime), aggressive compiler flags (-O3, LTO, AutoFDO), kernel tweaks, and a stateless design that minimized I/O overhead.

  • jeffbee 20 hours ago

    Mostly it's just compiling everything correctly and getting the most juice out of transparent hugepages.

    • bjconlan 20 hours ago

      Yeah, but there is something else here too... I used cachy for a heartbeat and it advertises the same benefits; it just felt slower (notably on boot) Maybe it was just all the graphical load screens.

      There's something clear had that made it feel modern, familiar and boring (which might not be for everyone) 90% of my tasks were in vscode devcontainers so kept things simple and out of the system for the most part.

      • etaioinshrdlu 20 hours ago

        Sounds like bloat removal and minimalism.

    • temp0826 20 hours ago

      I could be wrong but I think they used icc (Intel's c compiler) for most/everything?

      • jeffbee 20 hours ago

        I don't think they build any part of it with icc, the world's worst compiler. They do not even offer icc as a package.

tiffanyh 19 hours ago

The perf was remarkably impressive & a testament to the team.

Sad to hear about the team & shutdown.

What’s the next best alternative for server use (CachyOS)?

kachapopopow 19 hours ago

I was running this for a long time, only ever had a single crash from a live kernel update in 4 years that I had it on 3 AMD epyc servers.

  • esseph 19 hours ago

    This is both a neat anecdote, and also funny with the Epyc punchline at the end ;)

mrbluecoat 20 hours ago

My prediction is a handful of laid off employees will fork the repo and resurrect within a month with new branding.

  • mepian 6 hours ago

    The laid off employees will move on to a new full-time job, your fork will have to find maintainers somewhere else.

  • ThinkBeat 19 hours ago

    Hopefully. But if Intel were paying them to do so, doing it for free without secure financial backing might not be appealing. I do hope you are right.

  • nosioptar 18 hours ago

    Similar happened when Mandriva went under and Mageia started about 15ish years ago.

    Mageia is my favorite of the Mandrake descendants.

dehrmann 14 hours ago

I'm in the market for a new desktop PC. Historically, Intel has been better, or at least more likely to have Linux support. Performance-wise, it's comparable enough for productivity use and maybe more power efficient, but the company is losing money, shipping bugs that can damage hardware, and disinvesting in software. I'm late to the party, but I feel like I have to go AMD.

Thaxll 21 hours ago

Was it the distro that was booting in couple of seconds or ms from what I recall?

  • a012 19 hours ago

    It boots in less than 30s on my machine

    • jeffbee 3 hours ago

      This seems extraordinarily bad. Is there something weird about your machine? My completely vanilla ubuntu boots in 5s and Ubuntu is considered to be a slow-starting Linux.

s_ting765 17 hours ago

I maintain a custom kernel built on top of their patches optimized for performance that I now don't know what to do with.

stevefan1999 20 hours ago

How I fork the CI pipelines and the source codes

indigodaddy 20 hours ago

Is this the one that started out as ClarkConnect?

  • bee_rider 20 hours ago

    Pretty sure this is Intel’s Linux distro, the one that always benchmarked really well.

jeffbee 20 hours ago

This news, which has been obviously coming for years, also tends to throw doubt on all of Intel's other software projects. Who, for example, would actually invest in exploiting QAT? Even though it clearly offers opportunities for massive gains in the right applications, it also carries the obvious risk that Intel will abandon it.

  • mjevans 19 hours ago

    Even their other efforts, like GPU drivers. Chances are they _MIGHT_ still do Windows releases but probably not Linux.

taosx 20 hours ago

Always found clear linux very interesting and wanted to give it a try but totally expected this.

Iwan-Zotow 19 hours ago

What would happen with MKL?

My previous project depends on it

cpburns2009 20 hours ago

That's a huge disappointment. Clear Linux has been reliably the fastest distro. I'm going to have to find a replacement distro for my Minecraft server.

sprybear 15 hours ago

Thnks fr th Mmrs.