I’ve looked around in the About pages, I’ve looked around in the documentation, and I can’t find anything related to precisely what aims and principles Clear Linux is being developed with.
Like many others, I got very excited when I heard about Clear. The benchmarks reminded me of the disparity between Apple’s iPhones and Android devices using Snapdragon chipsets. There’s a big pack of distros competing neck and neck with each other… and then there’s one that’s out in front, running 2x-4x faster on many tasks. And that one is Clear. It benches faster than Windows in a lot of things, too!
Also like many others, my first thought was “I know that this seems to be a mostly cloud-targeted OS, but I could really use that Intel magic optimization in my daily desktop/multimedia work.” Windows is inefficient for me in a lot of interface and file management ways, macOS is limited to underpowered hardware (or completely unsupported if you go Hackintosh), and Linux works merrily until something upstream breaks and you have to spend a day fixing it. Clear sounds perfect. I need the stability it offers.
But then, whenever I see someone posting on here asking the devs about how to get some desktop-y proprietary stuff working, they say “this feature is proprietary and non-open-source”. Followed by a mic drop. Sorry, was that supposed to be an answer?
And yes, I know that you can hack a lot of this stuff together. But then we’re back into “hacking away at Linux just to install a few apps” land, and I can never get any work done when I have to wear both my “hacker hobbyist” hat and my “serious work day” hat at the same time. So I guess I’d like to know… is this a definite thing? Is Clear’s mission statement for-sure that closed-source addons are never going to have official bundles?
I can’t actually find anything in the PR pages about how staying open-source-only is their philosophy. It’s perfectly 100% fine with me if that’s what they’re doing, but I can’t see anything really hammering that in as the absolute goal. Maybe I’m blind. Correct me, I’d like that! My mind is open despite my ranting.
(PS, on a personal note, I do think that the development team needs to face the reality that a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life want to take advantage of their optimization, stateless cleanliness, and curated software. I’m sorry guys, the concept just makes too much sense! You did it too well, it’s perfect and now everyone wants it! 
)
If Clear is meant to stay completely sterile, maybe they’d be open to considering a Fedora-esque offshoot?
