February 13, 2020

Cons of Clear Linux

The Clear Linux distribution is similar to Antergos a rolling release model. It has perceived a lot of attention because it is able to outperform Debian desktop easily. It's a bit tricky to describe what is wrong with Clear Linux. The assumption is, that the projects gets terminated within 24 months because it will fail to communicate the idea to a larger audience.

What the Clear linux website is doing is to explain to the newbies, that rolling release updates is a here to stay, https://community.clearlinux.org/t/does-clear-linux-have-stable-release/1346/6 If a user likes to switch of the auto-update and tries to backport security fixes into Clear Linux, the adminstrator of the community forum will teach to the user, that this is not allowed because it makes no sense. That means, the newbies didn't have understood what Clear linux is about.

The problem is, that most of the users are interested in deactivating the auto-update feature and are programing backports, because this is equal to build a community around a distribution. This behavior isn't compatible with the Clear Linux project. So the question for the community admins is how to convince the public, that rollilng release is a here to stay. The answer is they will fail. Antergos has failed because it's not possible to explain what the advantages of rollling release is, and Clear linux will fail because of the same reason.

The combination of Open Source with a rollling release model for the Linux distribution is an anti-pattern. It will destroy any community.

Quote: "many of you probably noticed over the past several months, we no longer have enough free time to properly maintain Antergos." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antergos