I’ve recently done the same ahkok. I let go Windows to use Clear. Please keep guys. Not planning on using no other distro, Mac, or windows.
That’s impossible, and not worth our time. We have to assume some base level of skills. Since we target developers, not beginner Linux users, our documentation is appropriate.
I’ve been using linux for 25 years, and it is my opinion that 1) no, your docs are not appropriate and 2) docs are worth your time, always and 3) this is the smackdown thing I was talking about when we last interacted on this thread.
You said that you never want to come across as smacking someone down…Really? Then don’t reply to a new guy like this!
Or, get someone else on the team to work the Forums, because you just chased a guy off who may have been your next biggest fan.
Clearly, you are attracting the attention of users who are not as advanced as most. If you don’t want to be bothered answering their questions…point them to a place where they can get help, but don’t be a jerk and tell them “you’re not worth my time.”
Honestly guys. C’mon.
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If our docs are inadequate, anyone can file bugs on specific parts at any time, or even suggest improvements. All of it is on github. Non-specific criticism is totally okay, but, aside from throwing my hands up in the air and re-reading everything, nothing that leads to an actual improvement. I can certainly ask for a re-review, but, without any specific criticism it’s going to be difficult to rectify. So please, be specific.
We know docs are worth our time, permitted that users have the required skill level. Our writing team will write docs for users that fall in to that category. If someone wants to submit or create docs for users that fall outside of that skill category, great, that’s what forums are for. We’re happy to consider it for inclusion where appropriate as well. I’ve written many of the man pages and lots of that has ended up in the online tech docs, for instance.
Anyone can continue to come to this forum and ask any question. But questions for information and requests for work are different things. The Clear Linux team will continue to evaluate every request for work and I will try as best as I can to be honest about it and explain why we accept or reject these requests. And sometimes those rejections may be short and to the point, but that is better than us ignoring them by a large margin.
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I think your point should be well taken. The response to Aleksei was incredibly dismissive. As a new Linux user, I’m now reluctant to post something and get smacked down because I’m not a member of the elite club of Linux experts who Clear Linux is apparently meant for. Intel and the OS Team should be hoping for broad adoption of Clear Linux, not just adoption by a small and exclusive group of developers. Telling new users “you’re not worth my time” isn’t the way to achieve that broad adoption.
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There maybe should exist a noob section on this forum so then community members could chime in for the easy questions.
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I don’t understand this. Why do users impose what the goals of a project should be?
Maybe they don’t want broad adoption because of the maintenance costs that comes with it and it doesn’t support their focus of fast container/server deployments. Linux distros are different so they don’t need to cater to everyone.
The issue is that users need to select the one that meets their needs, not start using one and telling them they need to change to support the individual and their needs.
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Well, they’ve stated in the past they want broad usage and adoption:
“If we can’t get ClearLinux installed easily for our users, then we are already going to be struggling to get broader usage and adoption. So, we want to make installation as simple as possible - how do we do this?”
That was from April, 2019. Maybe Intel’s position has changed.
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They use the term broader. This could mean that by making installation easier, they are now targeting 20% of developers, rather than 10%. But more importantly:
Isn’t this the point of this thread to say that their position has been reviewed and changed to focus only on the parts that are important to them and the developers they are targeting.
Based on my experience as a distro maintainer is that once the desktop installer became available there was a steady stream of generic Linux users giving it a go for the performance benefits reported . The number of requests on Issues · clearlinux/distribution · GitHub went up quite a lot, with most requests outside the scope of the core product and for improving CL as a home desktop distro. Expanding the scope takes away resources from the core product (or costs more $$$).
While the changes that have been released so far have been fairly minor, it does change the signalling significantly. CL is not wanting to cater to the generic desktop distro/use case, but developers (and potentially not even inexperienced developers) and deployment. Just my opinion as obviously can’t speak on behalf of a company I don’t work for.
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If in the future Clear Linux decides to deprecate non core bundles such as darktable, would they consider handing off the package scripts to 3rd party repos, who would then set the path to (e.g.) /opt, prior to CL removing that bundle completely?
i.e. preserve as much of the heavy lifting that’s already been done.
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All spec files are open sourced all ready.
It’s not a valid question on who they’d designate to maintain the 3rd-party repo.
A proper question is who would take the responsibility to host and maintain such a 3rd-party repo.
To put this another way @anon35832275 – everything that is needed to do what you are suggesting is already available. If you wanted to run with it, you could (and should).
There is a bit to it to do it, and I expect the person or small group of persons who do the best job at it will gain the most traction and become the “official unofficial” 3rd party repo maintainers. Nothing would stop another group from doing the same thing – and if they do a better job, people will use their stuff instead – which benefits everyone overall.
In the context of tutorials for Clear Linux OS, we recently released a Tutorial difficulty rating, based on user skill level. Our skill levels, Experienced and Advanced, supports what @ahkok states above.
While this rating only applies to our tutorials, it explains how we view our target audience. From the standpoint of documentation, our team puts in a lot of effort in use-case validation and determining what’s appropriate, and weighing the potential risk of failure. When I look at tutorials for any Linux distro, I think of the tutorials category as providing the bleeding edge of development for the OS, as well as providing basic, straightforward use cases that are in demand.
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Intel must have their open source OS due to the last decision of Apple to discontinue using Intel. Intel must improve Clear Linux as their OS, to be the best open source OS in the market! I think will be a very good Apple competitor.
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Well, I’m considering myself a Developer and Linux experienced. But even for me/us small Newbe obstacles in Setting up / maintaining of a System can be annoying. Besides also Dev’s tend to like working in full functional Desktop environment.
I think legit noob issues also help advanced Users. E.g. I know how to solve missing “lock screen” button in the gnome menu. But does it mean that it has to be this way?
If enough “noobs” complain it will be solved upstream.
Besides every OS user is communicating about the OS. Before the change in Direction of CL I was telling every other Linux user including Dev’s of my good experience with CL. But know I’m warning them that the Desktop environment is difficult and is getting even more difficult beyond the point of daily usability with the prospect of no improvement. For a lot of them this is a Bummer, despite of the very nice performance.
I have stopped using CL and I was just getting started to be more involved - did even some Bug report with workaround fix on Git.
However - not sure if this is a good strategy of intel and now repelling new users…even if noob.
Pride comes before a Fall.
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The CL desktop is just vanilla GNOME, have you tried submitting your fixes there?
It was not GNOME related - dkms issue. And it is not a huge achievement.
However. I only wanted to underline my initial excitement about Clear Linux.
Most issues of using Clear Linux as Desktop Distro is not related to vanilla Gnome more to Nvidia Driver Issues. Even if it is mostly Nvidia’s gcc / upstream kernel incompatible flaw.
If you want to use this Distro for HPC/Scientific stuff it is super annoying if suddenly your system does not boot into a windowmanger anymore because again nvidia does not like the kernel or the gcc version or whatever.
This is also part of the Desktop experience besides you may want to use the same system for printing, postprocessing your work etc.
Yes, Flatpak is helping a lot but it is a hassle to teach packs to communicate with the system or other applications.
And just sometimes even a nerdy Dev wants to listen to Music on the Webbrowser during work sessions. But of course you have to compile ffmpeg …etc.
All of this is solvable as advanced user , sure - but my boss does not pay me for getting my high performance Distro comfortable for work and fixing the downsides of the distro.
Maybe I save 10%-30% on the computation time but then I need 300% of the driver fixing time.
You want to focus on Server and Cloud that is ok.
(…then you can get rid of alsa-utils, blender, gimp, games-dev bundles etc. too because nobody will use them if the Desktop env. is clunky. )
At the moment it seems to me CL wants to be a Dev Distro with the focus on server and cloud but on the otherhand it does not really provide a good environment for Devs to feel good at using it. As said before it was on the way…but now I like the performance but I hate the weekly fixme hours.
Thats why I droped CL after half a year of using it daily on multiple machines.
You may have noticed that Micheal Larabel one of CL biggest advocates in the past years also droped CL as daily distro. His influence in the Linux World especially if it comes to performance and benchmark shouldn’t be underestimated.
Previously on my main system I was using Intel’s Clear Linux. But when it came to transitioning to a new laptop, given Clear Linux divesting sort of from the desktop (albeit still supported) and other internal reorganizations that have happened within Intel, didn’t instill much confidence in continuing to use it as my daily driver.
I’m still hoping that the CL team will change their mind, because CL was getting to be a really really good Distribution.
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I don’t actually disagree with your issues (I fixed at least 25 bugs myself despite really disliking autospec and there’s still lots more). However, I do have an issue with people telling distros what they should or shouldn’t do (without fronting up to do it themselves or $$$). There’s plenty of things they could improve, but I feel like the resourcing has dropped significantly for the project (the community relations people have long gone). I moved on some time ago.
It’s not really set up for community contributions with simple things like build logs not being public (at least last time I looked).
So Intel stopped paying him to run the benchmarks (which essentially makes him a mouthpiece) Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News - Phoronix , that always turns him a bit sour 
Which is unfortunate cause I really think he doesn’t know a lot on the topic. He comments a few lines on the results with no idea what’s going on. CL also saw some really poor performance in some tests where the machine was thermally constrained (which isn’t unexpected).
Also in some of the Ubuntu vs CL benchmarks, if you remove 1 of the benchmarks (which may run 30 tests) the geometric mean changes from 5% difference to virtually no difference. Given it’s usually some synthetic disk benchmark, having the outcome driven by 1 benchmark is horrible. So Michael himself has a big bearing on the overall result by randomly (and how random is it?) choosing what benchmarks to run. If he excludes ones where there’s no difference, then it overestimates the performance difference (having an overall distro x is 8% faster than distro y is pretty insane when there’s zero methodology). And there would be soo many benchmarks where there’s no difference between distros.
Hopefully his latest article will highlight the poor practices. I mean how could you not rerun the benchmark, or even check ‘-O3’ and ‘-O2 -march=native’ flavours for some form of validation. I feel it will highlight how unreliable the numbers actually are (but people will likely ignore it as per usual).
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Thankyou for the more inside informations. This puts another complexion on the matter.
About the point telling what Distro maintainers should do or not.
In my opinion each OpenSource projects lives through thorough discourse. At least as a kind of feedback.
According to this matter:
CL started as a Developer Distro with focus on squeezing out the last drip of performance by compiling the system with more agressive and recent cpu instructions. That approach lured me.
After a certain time of observing the Development of the distro I have put time and effort into “learning” and using this great distro. Thinking how can I help with my limited time. (Even did at least a little).
Now tide has turned - this distro became less attractive for me because of the change in Direction.
That of course is fine - I’m not the owner of it so I have to deal with this fact.
But if everyone keeps silent and do not tell their disagree the Distro Maintainers will not see if this really helped to achieve their goal with the initial change of focus.
Maybe more people are joining because of cloud, server etc. I don’t know.
But with the approach they lost me an advanced Linux user, Developer in the field of physics with focus on scientific calculations, simulation and statistics.
Maybe I m the only one - so then for sure not much lost.
*p.s.: I really like autospec - even if it has its own quirks.
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Feedback is fine (and welcome) and I don’t think you’ve overstepped in any way. I think my comments were at more entitled people earlier in the thread where the distro should change to fit their wants (and as a distro person I’ve been on the other end of receiving ‘feedback’). I guess where this project differs to other distros is that it isn’t really a community project.
Deployments is where I see the money is to boost (or sustain) Intel server CPU sales. But I can’t speak for the project.
It has positives (largely the automation of build dependencies which is really nice!), but not integrating with the build system is a major drawback. The build additions are spread over 5-25 files and requires to be built at least twice to generate a package (which is completely unnecessary and irritates me).
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Yeah unfortunately there’s not much distributions that ship only OSS software can do here if you’re stuck in the Nvidia ecosystem. Best case is hoping someone hosting a 3rd party repo but even then you’re stuck at the whim of their ability to keep up with kernel/gcc changes, and for the aggressive kernel updates of CL is one of the best parts.