Magazines often celebrate the launch of a new Linux distro, but sometimes we're called upon to mark the passing of an old one. When Intel Corporation suddenly discontinued Clear Linux [1], a wave of activity erupted on forums and social networks. People who knew about the project expressed their disappointment, and people who had never heard of it asked questions, but it was too late. This Linux distribution was not a typical corporate product designed for businesses only. Clear Linux has had a significant impact on the entire Linux ecosystem by promoting innovation and performance optimization. With community support, the Clear Linux team created several open source projects and progressive ideas that shouldn't be forgotten. These ideas and projects will serve the entire Linux ecosystem in the future.

Clear Linux OS [2] was well known as a benchmark winner, according to the popular website Phoronix.com. Intel introduced Clear Linux OS in 2015 as a project designed for cloud usage and then released a desktop version (Figure 1 shows how it looked in 2019). According to the official website, this Linux distribution was "designed with the developer in mind" for IT, DevOps, cloud and container deployment, and AI professionals. However, nothing prevented an ordinary Linux enthusiast from using it, because there was no high-entry barrier as there is with Gentoo or Slackware. Although developed by Intel, Clear Linux also worked well on AMD hardware because the CPU architecture is the same. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, and QingCloud were all supported cloud platforms, and there were also images for Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, Parallels Desktop for mac, Proxmox, and VirtualBox. One thing the developers did not include was official Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) – good news for die-hard Linux fans.

Figure 1: Gnome was the default desktop environment of Clear Linux.

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