A Clear Linux official said: “After years of innovation and community collaboration, we are ending support for Clear Linux OS. Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS, and the GitHub repository will be archived in read-only mode. If you’re still using Clear Linux OS, we strongly recommend migrating to another actively maintained Linux distribution as soon as possible.”
Clear Linux was unusual in that it was built to be fast thanks to bleeding-edge toolchains, aggressive compiler optimisations, and system-wide tricks like profile-guided and link-time optimisation. Even AMD users saw performance gains, which made it popular in niche workloads. It pushed Intel’s hardware technologies, like AVX-512 and Optane, out of the box and shipped with a kernel tuned to squeeze every ounce of CPU frequency, multi-threading, and memory bandwidth available.
But that obsessive focus on performance tuning did not save it from the axe. Clear Linux now joins other abandoned Intel pet projects like Deep Link as Troubled Chipzilla slashes costs and restructures everything from engineers to entire software teams.
Phoronix pointed out that the announcement came during a turbulent week for Intel’s open-source division. A prominent Linux engineer walked, a key upstream driver lost its maintainer, and several Linux and open-source staff were among the latest layoffs. It is unclear whether Intel can maintain its historic influence over Linux kernel performance without those engineers.
Intel claims it will “remain deeply invested in the Linux ecosystem” and keep contributing to upstream projects and major distros. Some of the tech pioneered in Clear Linux is already being picked up by projects like CachyOS, so its legacy might live on in other optimised distros.
Still, for those who loved Clear Linux’s out-of-the-box speed and cutting-edge hardware support, this is the end of the line. Another once-promising Intel software experiment quietly tossed on the scrap heap.