Sorry, I meant that I created a GIT issue around my post suggesting a greeter.
Greetings, Intel squad! ClearLinux performs superbly on my Thinkpad T470. The installation process has gone off without a hitch. However, I think there are opportunities that can be made around the customization of the configuration for a ClearLinux install.
1 - The hard requirement (on the Desktop GUI Installer) to partition a drive with an EFI partition named “CLR_BOOT”, a swap partition named “CLR_SWAP”, and a root partition named “CLR_ROOT”. These hard names should be able to be replaced by just specifying mount points in an installer window, similar to how Solus does it.
2 - Not requiring a SWAP partition. My machine has enough RAM that a swap partition should not be needed. I haven’t checked to see if CL responds well if I just swapoff and delete the partition but…still, could be a big help to just have the ability to not need a partition right from the install config
3. Admittedly, I’m knowledgeable enough with Linux that I probably should have just gone with the Live Server install and used the custom config file option, but when I chose the Installation media to be my second (discrete) hard disk embedded in my Thinkpad, using the safe option (it even recognized that my other discrete hard disk was occupied with Windows so it didn’t list it as an option), after installation, I found out the installer botched my first disk’s EFI partition (i.e. the Windows Boot ESP). So I had to repair that after install (about a 20 minute process and I’m not overly thrilled about having to rewrite that much data on an SSD). I can’t say what happened, or why, or if this is for whatever reason an intended effect. I thought I could install CL on a totally separate disk and that would remove any chance for it accidentally messing with my Windows disk (I hate having it but I need it for work…) but alas, I was proven wrong 
4 - The clr-boot-mgr: while I love the idea, I think its just an unnecessary layer on top of systemd-boot. Create a gui app or something that can handle systemd-boot configs, but in the end, the installer didn’t even properly set up an NVRAM boot entry in my Thinkpad UEFI/BIOS. Luckily there’s an ability for the UEFI to boot a standard EFI file from a disk, and so that works to boot CL directly. But I don’t have access to systemd-boot, so the fact that there is all these efi’s sitting in my ESP is now useless, other than the ClearLinux efi. If I am being totally honest, let’s allow bypassing systemd-boot altogether. I really like my arch install where I have a script that I use to generate EFISTUB entries that just point directly to my initramfs, microcode initrd, the kernel, and my root partition. No systemd-boot needed. No clr-boot-mgr, I just get rid of all those packages and when there are kernel updates available, I just had pacman install the kernel to the boot partition, had a pacman hook to have dracut do any updates necessary, and rolled along. Maybe that’s possible in CL but I don’t know how kernel updates are handled exactly so I can’t be sure. Speaking of: does CL use mkinitcpio? What generates their initramfs?
5 - NetworkManager - the gnome network manager is great, and I’ve followed along with a thread (Enable support for IWD in NM and kernel · Issue #1258 · clearlinux/distribution · GitHub) to watch if the iwd package could supplant wpa_supplicant as the backend for NetworkManager. I would prefer to wipe out wpa_supplicant from the package list as iwd is just designed so much better (seriously, kudos intel developers!). I can’t imagine wpa_supplicant is having a hand in butchering my connectivity speeds (as even on wired connection its still very slow), but I would feel much better in eliminating that variable. I guess what I’m saying is: iwd should be enabled as the NetworkManager backend by default!
On an unrelated note, but I do feel compelled to say it: I think the systemd reliance is quite heavy and a bad decision; I saw some thread parading around its new home-management package - it made me cringe. One job for each tool. I get WHY its so helpful, and no doubt ripping it out would be…probably catastrophic, given its use for bypassing the need for an fstab file and so forth. I would feel remiss if I didn’t take an opportunity to champion the UNIX philosophy cause and use my small voice to warn off embracing systemd.
Overall, super happy and really excited to rip through CL. Intel has set a VERY good, high bar for what Linux should be!
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Hello Nathan, welcome to the forum, and thanks for your input.
I agree that setting up NVRAM could be a bit more straighforwarded.
I’m sure this will be picked up and dealt with in the near future. 
You often see people online saying that the installer has been stuck for hours so it would be more helpful for a visual progress report with text verbose what the installer is currently doing such as download speed of package or if it’s installing as being slow it hasn’t necessarily crashed.
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.
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 
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 
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.
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.