How can we improve our installation experience?

I think offering also the Budgie Desktop during the installation process would be nice, since it’s more minimalistic than Gnome, but it’s fully compatible with Gnome too, so it shouldn’t be hard to integrate?

Good morning from Germany, I just installed Clear Linux Desktop ten minutes ago and there are a few things (most oft them already mentioned) I would point out which need some improvements: even after I choosed English AS the system language and german-latin1 as my keyboard-layout, the layout itself still was an english layout, which is very problematic if you type in your password. You don’t have the Chance to look at your password (encryption password and user password).
It would be nice if there would an Option in the menu to select the network (or at least point to the gnome panel to select the network there).

I am not a Linux expert. I am not the guy you are developing this OS for. I’m not a cloud programmer or anything like that. I like to tinker with alternative operating systems, and I am your basic email/web user. That being said, I found your installation process to be ridiculously simple and very fast, once I got over one hurdle. I had to post on this forum to find out that I had to disable secure boot on my ThinkPad. Your average Joe whose previous Linux experience is installing Ubuntu isn’t going to know that. I suggest you either enable secure boot to eliminate this step, or make it painfully obvious in some way when the user is downloading the OS or creating the live USB.

I think Clear Linux is amazing and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I hope that you keep developing it, and do so in a way that will attract general interest users and create that broader usage and adoption you’re looking for.

I encountered a similar problem like @pwnerfly. I use Clear Linux on two systems with de-latin1-nodeadkeys (German keyboard) and LUKS encryption. On my older Lenovo T420, LUKS and the login password (GDM) can be entered with the German layout after install without any rework, but on my Dell XPS it uses a US layout.

After the installation on the XPS i set the keyboard layout to de-latin1-nodeadkeys again, changed the login password and done a cryptsetup luksAddKey ... to change the LUKS password. The login password is ok now, but LUKS uses still the US layout. I guess the keymap hook for the DE layout is missing? I guess users who are new to Linux will have a hard time to figure out why the password won’t be accepted.

The installation was done from the same USB stick and performed with the same steps (boot live system > connect wifi > start installer), don’t know what happened.

My Firefox seems to have added the H264 codec for me.

I personally will like to be able to create a root and a home partition, I know is an old stile layout but it save my day many time :slight_smile: and also a different file system at list if you don’t crypt the partition, having journal is nice but with the new NVME/SSD HD is better to skip it :grin:

I wanted to suggest using calamares that is found in most other distros. I personally do not like the Clear Linux’s installer. For some weird reason I was not able to install it on full disk on a virtualbox but this is not an issue with other distroes that comes with calamares.

I just created a topic here as a guide to installing the Flash Player addon to Firefox.

Has it been introduced in 2020?

Hi, I’m having a problem with the file. It gives me this error:
ERROR: Invalid type specified: ‘’ (specify ‘host’ or ‘container’)
Please help with this problem

I did fresh install from latest released desktop ISO with following commands on a legacy mode machine , no UEFI

mount /dev/sda13 /mnt

swupd os-install /mnt --bundles=os-core,os-core-update,kernel-native

swupd bundle-add desktop-autostart

everything went fine but boot directory is empty with no contents

so what are my options here to boot this installation?

Following bundles are installed

swupd bundle-list

Installed bundles:

  • NetworkManager
  • NetworkManager-extras
  • acpica-unix2
  • alsa-utils
  • aspell
  • aspell-de
  • aspell-es
  • aspell-fr
  • baobab
  • bootloader
  • cheese
  • curl
  • desktop
  • desktop-apps
  • desktop-assets
  • desktop-assets-extras
  • desktop-autostart
  • desktop-gnomelibs
  • desktop-locales
  • diffutils
  • emacs-x11
  • eog
  • evince
  • evolution
  • file
  • file-roller
  • findutils
  • firefox
  • flatpak
  • fonts-basic
  • fuse
  • geary
  • gedit
  • ghostscript
  • gimp
  • git
  • gjs
  • glibc-locale
  • gnome-base-libs
  • gnome-calculator
  • gnome-characters
  • gnome-color-manager
  • gnome-disk-utility
  • gnome-font-viewer
  • gnome-logs
  • gnome-music
  • gnome-photos
  • gnome-screenshot
  • gnome-system-monitor
  • gnome-todo
  • gnome-weather
  • graphviz
  • gstreamer
  • gvim
  • gzip
  • hardware-printing
  • hardware-uefi
  • htop
  • iperf
  • iproute2
  • kbd
  • kernel-install
  • kernel-native
  • less
  • lib-imageformat
  • lib-opengl
  • lib-openssl
  • lib-samba
  • libX11client
  • libglib
  • libstdcpp
  • libva-utils
  • linux-firmware
  • linux-firmware-extras
  • linux-firmware-wifi
  • man-pages
  • minicom
  • nautilus
  • openldap
  • openssl
  • os-core
  • os-core-plus
  • os-core-update
  • os-core-webproxy
  • p11-kit
  • parallel
  • patch
  • perl-basic
  • polkit
  • powertop
  • procps-ng
  • pulseaudio
  • pygobject
  • python3-basic
  • qemu-guest-additions
  • seahorse
  • socat
  • strace
  • sudo
  • sysadmin-basic
  • syslinux
  • thermal_daemon
  • tmux
  • totem
  • tzdata
  • unzip
  • webkitgtk
  • which
  • wpa_supplicant
  • x11-server
  • xz
  • zstd

Total: 112

the installer has been changes? I need to try some old ISO?

I think you have some serious issues with the installation, I’ll refer to the other post I made about this:

I’ve tried Clear a few times and previously would recommend it but I cannot any more. They refuse to make the installer compatible with other operating systems. My most recent install was even done by their recommend Clear first then Windows… And the only way to boot Clear is from bios setup. On my HP laptop, catching setup hasn’t been reliable.

The next OS level event on the laptop will be to copy win10 from SSS to M.2, overwrite Clear, and remove the SSD drive altogether.

This is a false statement. I installed Windows after CL and has no issue booting both OSes from boot menu.

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I can also confirm that it works.

Have you followed the new dual-boot tutorial and repair the boot menu via CL iso after installing Windows?

I can confirm as well. Simply edit the boot menu from clear Linux live desktop installer.

I have windows duel boot on one, centos8 on another, all three on another. They were all done in different orders (I took no particular care the order, just added whichever one I needed when I happened to need it).

If you follow the instructions, both run fine together.


  1. Using clr-installer is frustrating. For some reason [A]dvanced is selectable with ALT+A while Install or Cancel isn’t. The color schema used for Cancel|Install makes it hard to see what’s selected.

  2. I’d suggest to spend more time on maintenance of the documentation. It seems 50% of the stuff works according to the docs, while 50% doesn’t. In my use case I needed VNC Server or XRDP and KVM. I couldn’t get any of these 3 to work by following the documentation and spending hours on trying out various troubleshooting suggestions and workarounds.

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