The Intel based Clear Linux is the upraising star on the Linux desktop ecosystem. Instead of describing the technical side which has to do with installing the system on a real PC the more interesting feature is the background story. Clear Linux has two interesting features: first one is, that in contrast to Debian the system wasn't developed by amateur volunteers but by professional Intel programmers, and secondly the idea is not to provide a Linux distribution which runs on outdated PC which were available 20 years ago, but Clear Linux was compiled with the latest compilers and the most advanced flags available.
The story makes a lot of sense and it will force other Linux distributions to go into a similar direction. The interesting point is, that the Clear Linux distribution and the idea of the Open source ecosystem are fitting well together. fedora was the first company who has proven that Linux is a commercial product. Intel has become the second company who is going toward that direction. The unsolved problem with Clear Linux is, that a desktop Linux is adressed to the end user. And this audience is difficult to handle. The dominant reason why Microsoft is successful is because it is able to provide additional help to the normal consumer. It's hard to tell if Intel can do the same.
Suppose an end user has a problem with Clear Linux. Does he get a forum or a repository server? Does Intel provides warranty for the software? All these points are unsolved. Let us take a look into a similar project, called Antergos. This was a minimalist desktop operating system based on Arch Linux. The problem with Antergos was, that it was canceled after a while. Not because of the software itself, which was state of the art, because of the unsolved communication between the project and the end user.
If a company is publishing a software to the market, the company has to provide support as well. It will depend on this issue, if Clear Linux becomes successful or not.
Let us describe the situation in detail. THe Clear Linux website provides an about section https://clearlinux.org/community/bug-report in which the user is asked to send bug reports. He can do so with the github issue tracker or with e-mail. What will happen, if thousands of users are installing the software and sending bugs to the company? Can Intel handle feature requests from normal endusers who are not developers?
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