Ask Me Anything w/ @miguelinux - Oct 8, 1pm PST

For our next AMA, @miguelinux will be answering your questions live Oct 8, 2019 - 1pm PST. Feel free to start posting a question below.

Miguel is a Linux user enthusiast who works at Intel since 2011 and within Open Source since 2014. His nickname, @miguelinux, came from his computer master degree in 2003.

At Intel, he is responsible to maintain the Linux kernel updated on Clear Linux OS and add the missing drivers. Also, he wants to help people to get involved in the Linux ecosystem.

He lives in Guadalajara, Mexico, and if you want to ask in Spanish, he will translate your question and answer in English and Spanish.

“Hola, si tienes una pregunta en español no dudes en hacerla, yo la traducirĂ© al ingles y contestarĂ© en español e ingles.”


Some guidelines during AMA:

  • Please only ask one question per reply. Use the ‘Reply button’ at the bottom of each post to do that
  • Please do not reply to anyone else’s question. The only purpose of replies here in this topic is to ask @miguelinux one question. If you’d like to discuss a related topic in more detail, create a new topic.
  • It’s also helpful to scroll to the bottom while reading the topic to make sure nobody else has asked the same question.

Posts not following these guidelines might be removed to keep the AMA setup.

AMA is an abbreviation for “ask me anything.” As a noun it often means “an event during which a person will answer questions from an audience.”

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Awesome. Thanks for doing this @miguelinux!

My question:

If you could wave a wand and have a dream feature in ClearLinux, what would it be?

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If, at some moment in future, Clear Linux stands at the crossroads


One leading to maximum performance, the other leading to maximum energy savings


Which road would it take, if there’s only one possible choice ?

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Are there any plans to give the community more freedom in regards to what should be installed from a bundle @miguelinux?

I feel like there are a lot of packages which accumulate over time when you gather bundles, most packages aren’t necessarily needed for every setup but they’re still included and this is reoccurring frequently which in turn leads to a lot unwanted content in the system. It would be greatly appreciated if this was brought to attention.

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The Clear Linux team has done an incredible job creating a super fast distro.

A dream list for me would be to make packages more customizable ala Arch. What do you feel are some of the roadblocks?

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If Clear Linux was a car

describe its features, its look, and what it feels like to drive it

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You’ve been doing this clearlinux thing for a while now! I remember interviewing you to join the team. You had some incredibly interesting projects that you worked on before. Do you think that, today, you could something like those project with Clearlinux, or, are we still missing something, or just fundamentally are we not there (yet)?

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What are the major challenges to maintain the Linux kernel updated on Clear Linux OS?

If you could change anything about the way the kernel/config is put together from source, what would it be?
Also, tell me a good kernel joke.

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A better integration with external applications (non bundles) :wink:

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Usually performance bring power save when it is applied correctly.
I mean Clear Linux has a good performance as it is using the latest CPU
features, and that brings some energy saving, so performance is winner

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The bundles are targeted to solve a use case, but we have heard from users that they
want to install or use small pieces of software from the general use case.

Clear Linux from last year has been intrudicing the “small bundles” based on packages,
you can see it on clr-bundles/packages.list at master · clearlinux/clr-bundles · GitHub

Also Clear Linux team is constantly working on improve the experience and has introduced
a way to uninstall an included bundle. With this you can remove a bundle that was installed
by other bundle. For development you have the -devpkg bundles, which is another improvement
on buendles size.

Regarding to enable more “small bundles” our DevOps team is working on it, becasue there were
some contrains to increase the management of bundles.

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Currently our package manager is based on “bundles”, they are built using RPM, this help us to solve dependencies and we keep free of file conflicts.

You can install all the bundles and none file will have conflicts, but how can we guarantee
that this on a user addition. This is something that we need to figure out how to solve.

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It is a combination between a Hommer (for security) a Ferrary (for speed) and a buggie (for all terrain and you can modify as you want)

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Certainly Clear Linux has all the requirements that i needed to do in my old projects, even more it has some scientific tools, that I would have used it.

Today with all the speed optimizations all my algorithms would fly.

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To select the new features on new kernels, because we had some draw backs on selecting some new features that breaks performance and we need to disable it.

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I would like to know if there’s an integration with reproducible builds with the Clear Linux package manager or in some way. Thanks!

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From the kernel/config i will improve the way that the features are presented when they are new when a new kernel major release is out.

As I said before, it is a little difficult to choose the good ones when a new kernel comes out.

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Currently clear Linux sings the kernel modules and the key is generated in the build process and this signature is random, so we can not have reproducible build on kernel packages.

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