For background: This was Intel's distro and it's likely that most/all of the folks that were maintaining it are a part of the 5,000 layoffs just announced, bringing the total Intel layoffs to 20,000 people.
Round after round of layoffs is terrible for morale and drives away existing good talent. Layoffs should cut deep... once. Corporations these days are rehashing the unwise, bureaucratic stupidity of decades past.
Yep. Wage suppression and insta stock bump. Publicly- and private equity-owned corporations are inherently unstable beasts. Knowledge workers and ordinary workers need to band together and start their own co-ops that stay private, partially collectively-owned, have retirement plans, high performance people, pride in their goods and services, high job satisfaction, and very low turnover because everyone is trying to join them.
From my experience, none. "Utterly unfortunately, today was your last day with the company. A separation agreement has been sent to your personal email. Your corporate access is being revoked. Thank you for your contribution!"
Being fired for poor performance is all about ample warnings, issuing a PIP, etc. The company wants the employee back on track. Being laid off is a situation that an employee cannot fix with their efforts. There's no incentive to work this week if it is already known that you are going to be laid off next week, but some employees might consider a prank or even minor sabotage as a helpless act of protest. It's safest to dismiss the laid-off ASAP.
It’s also not legal in much of the world to do that, thankfully. There’s weeks/months to negotiate collectively with the company, possibly organise a strike with those not at risk of redundancy or even just to say goodbye to coworkers.
This works if you have a trade union. I'd hazard to say that at least 99% of software engineers in the US work on "at-will" employment agreements, and do not belong to any unions.
A separation agreement usually stipulates paying 2-3 months worth of salary, and extending the benefits similarly. I don't see how it is worse than spending a couple of extra weeks in the office, and receiving the same.
(Also note that employees that are harder to lay off also get hired with much more reluctance.)
Early in my career in the mid 2000s, the startup that was on the same floor as mine laid off a QA person, who then showed up the next day and fatally shot the CEO and head of HR. Our CEO called me and told me not to come in that day.
This[0] is just the first result searching and it is from this week too. But it is not uncommon. Insider threats to infrastructure exist at all times of course but a disgruntled employee with administrative access and knowledge of the infrastructure can do a lot of damage quickly.
if your goal is healthy companies that can hire employees and give the employees what employees want (jobs, if you got lost) then don't saddle companies with extra expenses that are not productive. giving employees a bonus for non productive activity on top of the company's failure is just stupid.
if immigrants with menial jobs can save money and even send money back home to their families, so can higher status employees.
Knowing which projects/languages/frameworks to invest time into and which to skip (even if they produce useful subprojects) is a superpower these days.
"a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age."
Sure, but the counter is that you're going to be very late to some new foundational tech (ex. Kubernetes) that are legitimately useful. There are benefits to being early to a trend that has legs
There’s nothing wrong with getting involved in things that seem like they might be interesting without counting on their long-term survival. Hype-chasing on the other hand tends to be a bad plan.
Yes, but you pay a real cost for those choices too. A management plane that is non deterministic, imperative, and full of highly mutable state, not to mention basic stuff like the package manager metadata and cache not being shareable, and package installs all having to be serialized because they all call shell scripts as root. These limitations constrain even tools like dagger from providing a first class interface to apt like there is for apk because any deb could have rm -rf / as the postinstall script.
A lot of normal users don’t feel these pain points or tolerate them by sidestepping the whole affair with containers or VM images. But if you’re in a position where these things have an impact it can be extremely motivating to seek out others who are willing to experiment with different ways of doing things.
I did indeed deploy Nix to moderate success in a prior gig, but have held back pushing it at my current one; we're simply not at the scale where the problems that Nix solves are worth the cost (yet, maybe ever).
For a less controversial take, consider alpine's apk package manager. For a single-use container that runs one utility in an early dockerfile stage, apk can probably produce that image in 2-3 seconds, whereas for an apt-based container it's more like 30 seconds. That may not matter in the grand scheme of things or with layer caching or whatever, but sometimes it really does.
I’m assuming a friendly tone here, and in a similar tone its funny because I also think Nix is not adopted because its benefits just aren't worth the cost to users (devs)
A good start would be to distrust anything made by a VC funded start-up or a once-great tech co.
If you do want to use something they made, create a hard fork and pretend they already ditched the project as they inevitably will.
If you spit up chip design and fab, who would be interested in each? And is there enough x86 demand to keep the design side open? Windows on ARM is a thing, and data centers have been buying more from AMD than they used to.
Hard disagree here, corporations almost always have the biggest pockets to fund continued R&D.
There’s a tension there, but this is why it’s a skill — theres no simple rule. Fully open source community governed projects can be some of the most obviously good to ignore.
Some are easy to see to avoid (ie Google, https://killedbygoogle.com), whereas others like this one are a bit more unexpected though make sense (to me) in hindsight.
Well, sure, but those weren't instructions. Just general guidelines to counter the claim that choosing safe technology requires superpowers. It is much simpler than that.
This happened recently with Scitkit-Learn Intelex, which was a drop-in replacement for some parts of sklearn that was a bit faster. One day, the Intel channel on Conda just stopped working (and I learned that Anaconda loses the will to live when a random channel you installed one package from is unavailable) and another organization took over Sklearn Intelex.
No communication could be found on Google connecting them to Intel (whose only news around the package was announcing the initial release a few years ago), you had to read the Git issue history to find people talking about the transfer.
I still have no idea what even happened to their Conda channel after the sudden disappearance. The complete lack of communication just left a bad taste in my mouth...
Is OpenCV still owned by Intel, or dependent by them (funding, engineers, etc)? There are many good distros out there, but to my knowledge OpenCV has no other FOSS alternative on par with it.
Pretty sure Intel abandoned it like fifteen years ago, and then Willow Garage employed some of the people, now there’s an independent OpenCV Foundation.
But I have no idea who’s actually paying the bills, behind the scenes.
I mean, Clear Linux was the leader in the vast majority of Linux benchmarks, to my knowledge. So much so that even AMD used it in their advertised benchmarks for CPU releases because of the performance advantage.
I think it was quite successful, and I doubt they are shuttering it because they don't see the value in it, but because of overall lackluster company performance and the new CEO cutting costs/the workforce aggressively.
I don't think there will be one, a company would need to commit to salaried devs. What would the value-added proposition be for them that they can't get by using any other distro out there?
The problem is that Clear Linux did a lot of tweaking in their packaging to get good performance, up to and including actual code patching IIRC, so it would be a nontrivial ongoing effort to continue that work.
I wonder how much this will affect Kata Containers, which is AFAIK like the best/only good way to run containers in k8s with the security of VMs? https://katacontainers.io/
Man. There's so much amazing work Intel has done for the ecosystem. It's so hard so scary to imagine this world where no one else fills in so so much, so unclear who else does. Intel has done so so much for the ecosystem. It feels like open source has been an Immortal phalanx, always people to fill in: I hope so much I'm wrong but this shift in Intel feels like the death of the Immortal. What a pity that CHIPS act turned to dust, left such an amazing crucial industry hang out to dry.
Clear Linux's performance came primarily from function multi-versioning (CPU-specific optimizations at runtime), aggressive compiler flags (-O3, LTO, AutoFDO), kernel tweaks, and a stateless design that minimized I/O overhead.
Yeah, but there is something else here too... I used cachy for a heartbeat and it advertises the same benefits; it just felt slower (notably on boot) Maybe it was just all the graphical load screens.
There's something clear had that made it feel modern, familiar and boring (which might not be for everyone) 90% of my tasks were in vscode devcontainers so kept things simple and out of the system for the most part.
This seems extraordinarily bad. Is there something weird about your machine? My completely vanilla ubuntu boots in 5s and Ubuntu is considered to be a slow-starting Linux.
I'm in the market for a new desktop PC. Historically, Intel has been better, or at least more likely to have Linux support. Performance-wise, it's comparable enough for productivity use and maybe more power efficient, but the company is losing money, shipping bugs that can damage hardware, and disinvesting in software. I'm late to the party, but I feel like I have to go AMD.
This news, which has been obviously coming for years, also tends to throw doubt on all of Intel's other software projects. Who, for example, would actually invest in exploiting QAT? Even though it clearly offers opportunities for massive gains in the right applications, it also carries the obvious risk that Intel will abandon it.
That's a huge disappointment. Clear Linux has been reliably the fastest distro. I'm going to have to find a replacement distro for my Minecraft server.
For background: This was Intel's distro and it's likely that most/all of the folks that were maintaining it are a part of the 5,000 layoffs just announced, bringing the total Intel layoffs to 20,000 people.
Today? Happy Friday I guess. Getting mass layoff fatigue.
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How do you flag low quality comments in HN?
>Effective immediately,
>we strongly recommend planning your migration
Not even a brief period of advance notice to do a migration? Just one day no more security patches...
wth is going on over at intel
> wth is going on over at intel
Thousands of layoffs. It's surprising someone even had time to post the notice.
no, the message poster keeps his job, so expect more messages
Round after round of layoffs is terrible for morale and drives away existing good talent. Layoffs should cut deep... once. Corporations these days are rehashing the unwise, bureaucratic stupidity of decades past.
Layoffs have just become a way to manage quarterly EPS.
Yep. Wage suppression and insta stock bump. Publicly- and private equity-owned corporations are inherently unstable beasts. Knowledge workers and ordinary workers need to band together and start their own co-ops that stay private, partially collectively-owned, have retirement plans, high performance people, pride in their goods and services, high job satisfaction, and very low turnover because everyone is trying to join them.
They don’t want to retain good (costly) talent. They want to shed the costly talent and acquire cheap talent.
We need a FuckedCompany2.com these days.
Intel. The Nvidia of the 90's. Oh success, you fickle fickle bride.-
How much notice did ppl get when sacked?
From my experience, none. "Utterly unfortunately, today was your last day with the company. A separation agreement has been sent to your personal email. Your corporate access is being revoked. Thank you for your contribution!"
Being fired for poor performance is all about ample warnings, issuing a PIP, etc. The company wants the employee back on track. Being laid off is a situation that an employee cannot fix with their efforts. There's no incentive to work this week if it is already known that you are going to be laid off next week, but some employees might consider a prank or even minor sabotage as a helpless act of protest. It's safest to dismiss the laid-off ASAP.
It’s also not legal in much of the world to do that, thankfully. There’s weeks/months to negotiate collectively with the company, possibly organise a strike with those not at risk of redundancy or even just to say goodbye to coworkers.
This works if you have a trade union. I'd hazard to say that at least 99% of software engineers in the US work on "at-will" employment agreements, and do not belong to any unions.
A separation agreement usually stipulates paying 2-3 months worth of salary, and extending the benefits similarly. I don't see how it is worse than spending a couple of extra weeks in the office, and receiving the same.
(Also note that employees that are harder to lay off also get hired with much more reluctance.)
PIP is not “wants the employee back on track”. It’s “documentation of a performance problem and good faith attempt at remedy to justify firing”.
"Employees might sabotage stuff" is something parroted constantly and there's never any proof it is a significant issue.
It's not common, but it absolutely happens: https://www.courthousenews.com/man-behind-s-f-system-lockout...
Early in my career in the mid 2000s, the startup that was on the same floor as mine laid off a QA person, who then showed up the next day and fatally shot the CEO and head of HR. Our CEO called me and told me not to come in that day.
This[0] is just the first result searching and it is from this week too. But it is not uncommon. Insider threats to infrastructure exist at all times of course but a disgruntled employee with administrative access and knowledge of the infrastructure can do a lot of damage quickly.
[0]: https://flaglerlive.com/it-attack-firing/
A single person can cause a lot of damage.
A week, maybe 2 for this last round? They were announced on the 13th I believe, for "mid July" layoffs.
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Maybe it's time for me to stop using this website
I rarely resort to this sort of comment online, but I feel it is warranted in this case: fuck you.
you seem angry
you seem to be posting bait.
if your goal is healthy companies that can hire employees and give the employees what employees want (jobs, if you got lost) then don't saddle companies with extra expenses that are not productive. giving employees a bonus for non productive activity on top of the company's failure is just stupid.
if immigrants with menial jobs can save money and even send money back home to their families, so can higher status employees.
Why won't someone think of the poor struggling companies!!
Mass firings
Is this a guess, or have you heard something?
Intel Job Losses Mount as 4,000 layoffs are reported across multiple sites
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/intel-job-losses...
It's in the news
wth
Such a cool project.
One of my fondest memories was making my own steamOS with Clear Linux: https://community.clearlinux.org/t/notes-on-building-a-clear...
And now I work on bazzite.gg, thanks for making a kickass OS Arjan and Co!
Knowing which projects/languages/frameworks to invest time into and which to skip (even if they produce useful subprojects) is a superpower these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
"a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age."
Sure, but the counter is that you're going to be very late to some new foundational tech (ex. Kubernetes) that are legitimately useful. There are benefits to being early to a trend that has legs
There’s nothing wrong with getting involved in things that seem like they might be interesting without counting on their long-term survival. Hype-chasing on the other hand tends to be a bad plan.
Debian, FreeBSD.. the longstanding community software is immune from these kinds of rug pulls.
Yes, but you pay a real cost for those choices too. A management plane that is non deterministic, imperative, and full of highly mutable state, not to mention basic stuff like the package manager metadata and cache not being shareable, and package installs all having to be serialized because they all call shell scripts as root. These limitations constrain even tools like dagger from providing a first class interface to apt like there is for apk because any deb could have rm -rf / as the postinstall script.
A lot of normal users don’t feel these pain points or tolerate them by sidestepping the whole affair with containers or VM images. But if you’re in a position where these things have an impact it can be extremely motivating to seek out others who are willing to experiment with different ways of doing things.
I'll bet $20 your solution to the problems you posed is "Nix"
I did indeed deploy Nix to moderate success in a prior gig, but have held back pushing it at my current one; we're simply not at the scale where the problems that Nix solves are worth the cost (yet, maybe ever).
For a less controversial take, consider alpine's apk package manager. For a single-use container that runs one utility in an early dockerfile stage, apk can probably produce that image in 2-3 seconds, whereas for an apt-based container it's more like 30 seconds. That may not matter in the grand scheme of things or with layer caching or whatever, but sometimes it really does.
I’m assuming a friendly tone here, and in a similar tone its funny because I also think Nix is not adopted because its benefits just aren't worth the cost to users (devs)
A good start would be to distrust anything made by a VC funded start-up or a once-great tech co. If you do want to use something they made, create a hard fork and pretend they already ditched the project as they inevitably will.
sure but this approach is limited, ChatGPT would have failed this test.
yes
Always bet against Intel whenever it's something software?
Intel will probably be somebody’s subsidiary for less than $150B sometime within the next 3 years, pending DOJ approval.
Company is absolutely cooked.
$150B is pretty cheap if it comes with ready-to-go chip fabs.
I’d expect the fabs to get spun off at some point a la AMD/GlobalFoundries.
AMD/GF spin-off was backed by Saudi money, who is going to pay this time?
You have to remember it comes with a phenomenal debt load.
There's enough value still there...
If you spit up chip design and fab, who would be interested in each? And is there enough x86 demand to keep the design side open? Windows on ARM is a thing, and data centers have been buying more from AMD than they used to.
I dunno I feel like I see Intel bail out AMD on a lot of linux/x86 software stuff.
Intel is not even #1 in the datacenter for CPU anymore.
Cooked
Rule #1: Exclude those with corporate ownership or dependence.
Unmaintained free software is nearly as useless as corporate-sponsored OSS whose funding and support has disappeared
Hard disagree here, corporations almost always have the biggest pockets to fund continued R&D.
There’s a tension there, but this is why it’s a skill — theres no simple rule. Fully open source community governed projects can be some of the most obviously good to ignore.
Some are easy to see to avoid (ie Google, https://killedbygoogle.com), whereas others like this one are a bit more unexpected though make sense (to me) in hindsight.
Intel's graveyard, even before this year, is just about as big as Google's.
Interesting, I didn't know that.
Is there a list, like there is for Google?
Also knowing when to give up and not get dragged into the sunk ship cost
It's not that difficult. Choose boring over trendy. Simple over complex. Stability and quality over speed and quantity.
There is a lot of software that fits and optimizes for the former. Just be smart and selective about your choices, and avoid compromising.
It's not that simple actually -- this kind of thinking might leave you working on mainframes in 2000 (or even now) which is obviously a mistake.
It requires a certain taste. There's a skill involved.
> Just be smart and selective about your choices, and avoid compromising.
This is a very "draw the rest of the owl" kind of statement
Well, sure, but those weren't instructions. Just general guidelines to counter the claim that choosing safe technology requires superpowers. It is much simpler than that.
As soon as I saw it was a project by Intel I rolled my eyes and ignored it.
What's going on over at Intel anyway?
This happened recently with Scitkit-Learn Intelex, which was a drop-in replacement for some parts of sklearn that was a bit faster. One day, the Intel channel on Conda just stopped working (and I learned that Anaconda loses the will to live when a random channel you installed one package from is unavailable) and another organization took over Sklearn Intelex.
No communication could be found on Google connecting them to Intel (whose only news around the package was announcing the initial release a few years ago), you had to read the Git issue history to find people talking about the transfer.
I still have no idea what even happened to their Conda channel after the sudden disappearance. The complete lack of communication just left a bad taste in my mouth...
Multiple, multiple, multiple rounds of mass firings. Check the news past couple of months.
Also completely outsourced all marketing.
Is OpenCV still owned by Intel, or dependent by them (funding, engineers, etc)? There are many good distros out there, but to my knowledge OpenCV has no other FOSS alternative on par with it.
Pretty sure Intel abandoned it like fifteen years ago, and then Willow Garage employed some of the people, now there’s an independent OpenCV Foundation.
But I have no idea who’s actually paying the bills, behind the scenes.
I mean, Clear Linux was the leader in the vast majority of Linux benchmarks, to my knowledge. So much so that even AMD used it in their advertised benchmarks for CPU releases because of the performance advantage.
I think it was quite successful, and I doubt they are shuttering it because they don't see the value in it, but because of overall lackluster company performance and the new CEO cutting costs/the workforce aggressively.
It being a Linux distro, I wonder how soon a viable fork will appear.
Fingers crossed. I probably just did my last fresh install of this a couple of days ago and my last swupd update now. You will be missed...
I don't think there will be one, a company would need to commit to salaried devs. What would the value-added proposition be for them that they can't get by using any other distro out there?
The problem is that Clear Linux did a lot of tweaking in their packaging to get good performance, up to and including actual code patching IIRC, so it would be a nontrivial ongoing effort to continue that work.
As a user I found it to be pretty buggy; driver issues on Intel NUCs causing instability.
It's always interesting when a company announces that it has leadership in paycheck only.
We are bankrupt of direction or ideas. Was are going to make panic knee jerk decisons in a public view.
I guess to the ultra rich owner class it looks like work. Business idiots all around the MBA tree.
I have no stake in clearlinux future or past, just observing.
> leadership in paycheck only.
With your leave I am borrowing this. Succinct yet so very descriptive.-
Ooof. What a stellar project. Alas.
I wonder how much this will affect Kata Containers, which is AFAIK like the best/only good way to run containers in k8s with the security of VMs? https://katacontainers.io/
Man. There's so much amazing work Intel has done for the ecosystem. It's so hard so scary to imagine this world where no one else fills in so so much, so unclear who else does. Intel has done so so much for the ecosystem. It feels like open source has been an Immortal phalanx, always people to fill in: I hope so much I'm wrong but this shift in Intel feels like the death of the Immortal. What a pity that CHIPS act turned to dust, left such an amazing crucial industry hang out to dry.
> Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS
If you've ever wondered how to lose all trust from your user base, it's the words effective immediately.
People need time to move and this basically gives users until the first vulnerability. Thanks Intel.
What optimizations did they do that had the biggest effect? can they be brought into the mainline linux kernel and distros?
Clear Linux's performance came primarily from function multi-versioning (CPU-specific optimizations at runtime), aggressive compiler flags (-O3, LTO, AutoFDO), kernel tweaks, and a stateless design that minimized I/O overhead.
Mostly it's just compiling everything correctly and getting the most juice out of transparent hugepages.
Yeah, but there is something else here too... I used cachy for a heartbeat and it advertises the same benefits; it just felt slower (notably on boot) Maybe it was just all the graphical load screens.
There's something clear had that made it feel modern, familiar and boring (which might not be for everyone) 90% of my tasks were in vscode devcontainers so kept things simple and out of the system for the most part.
Sounds like bloat removal and minimalism.
I could be wrong but I think they used icc (Intel's c compiler) for most/everything?
I don't think they build any part of it with icc, the world's worst compiler. They do not even offer icc as a package.
The perf was remarkably impressive & a testament to the team.
Sad to hear about the team & shutdown.
What’s the next best alternative for server use (CachyOS)?
I was running this for a long time, only ever had a single crash from a live kernel update in 4 years that I had it on 3 AMD epyc servers.
This is both a neat anecdote, and also funny with the Epyc punchline at the end ;)
My prediction is a handful of laid off employees will fork the repo and resurrect within a month with new branding.
Hopefully. But if Intel were paying them to do so, doing it for free without secure financial backing might not be appealing. I do hope you are right.
The laid off employees will move on to a new full-time job, your fork will have to find maintainers somewhere else.
Similar happened when Mandriva went under and Mageia started about 15ish years ago.
Mageia is my favorite of the Mandrake descendants.
Was it the distro that was booting in couple of seconds or ms from what I recall?
It boots in less than 30s on my machine
This seems extraordinarily bad. Is there something weird about your machine? My completely vanilla ubuntu boots in 5s and Ubuntu is considered to be a slow-starting Linux.
I'm in the market for a new desktop PC. Historically, Intel has been better, or at least more likely to have Linux support. Performance-wise, it's comparable enough for productivity use and maybe more power efficient, but the company is losing money, shipping bugs that can damage hardware, and disinvesting in software. I'm late to the party, but I feel like I have to go AMD.
I maintain a custom kernel built on top of their patches optimized for performance that I now don't know what to do with.
How I fork the CI pipelines and the source codes
Is this the one that started out as ClarkConnect?
Pretty sure this is Intel’s Linux distro, the one that always benchmarked really well.
This news, which has been obviously coming for years, also tends to throw doubt on all of Intel's other software projects. Who, for example, would actually invest in exploiting QAT? Even though it clearly offers opportunities for massive gains in the right applications, it also carries the obvious risk that Intel will abandon it.
Even their other efforts, like GPU drivers. Chances are they _MIGHT_ still do Windows releases but probably not Linux.
Always found clear linux very interesting and wanted to give it a try but totally expected this.
Related perhaps:
Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44585755
What would happen with MKL?
My previous project depends on it
That's a huge disappointment. Clear Linux has been reliably the fastest distro. I'm going to have to find a replacement distro for my Minecraft server.
Thnks fr th Mmrs.
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