Clear Linux EOL and new road ahead

[paulcarroty]

The discontinuation of Clear Linux means bad news for this project, which was built on Clear. I'm currently looking for new ideas that could be good directions for Clear Fraction in the post-Clear era. One option is performance-optimized packages for other Linux distributions or a distro-agnostic format like AppImage. I'd like to hear more from you.

Huge thanks to everyone who helped Clear Fraction in any way: contributors, patrons, those who reported bugs, consultants and anyone else I unintentionally forgot:

@dedguy21 @FrozzDay @kuboosoft @K1ngfish3r @lebensterben @marioroy Roberto

[lebensterben]

I've switched to NixOS.

P.S. I'm still alive but just dealing with other stuff in my life.

[paulcarroty]

NixOS seems cool, but requires huge time investments. It's probably most revolutionary distro on par with AerynOS.

@lebensterben I wish you a freedom to deal with what you want to 😉

[K1ngfish3r]

Trying to use COSMIC desktop on AerynOS right now, the fonts are kinda odd, the usual keyboard shortcuts for opening stuff on either GNOME or KDE dont work and the usb drives dont appear in cosmic-files so have to mount them manually.

But other than that, seems ok. Am getting spoiled by the animations after not seeing them for quite awhile.

[K1ngfish3r]

user count should be similar to CLR, the distro maintainers on the Matrix are fairly active, performance is great albeit weird QoL issues, like Alt+Tabbing causing stutters, but that's probably cause im on COSMIC

Speaking with the devs, a KDE Plasma iso is coming out soon, so that would be a good time to try out the distro

Its not immutable, but it is trying to enforce a stateless more strict than CLR. A gnu toolchain is available but they try to find ways to patch out programs which cant be built without it.

[FrozzDay]

1.8GB ISO, not that big. (Hear that, Clear Linux ISO)

[paulcarroty]

@K1ngfish3r Okay, that's interesting. I need two or three free afternoons to test it. What about a third-party repository?

[K1ngfish3r]

https://hackmd.io/VpZfUDJ-T0WDUPly4Ia1nQ solus and aerynos might end up merging (?). My reading comprehension on this is spotty at best and completely wrong at worst

Adding a repo and using it is as simple as adding the url and sync'ing it via moss. https://aerynos.dev/packaging/workflow/basic-workflow/ . We can set the priority level for a repo if there are clashes between them, but not sure if a third party repo is required at this point.

[paulcarroty]

Kinda doubtful if you still remember how Ikey left Solus. The extra repo support is good, seems like.

Another problem is poor Sway state - no swaylock, swayidle, swaybg.

[FrozzDay]

AppImage is great idea. I don't know how it work. But how about the 3rd party library?

[paulcarroty]

https://www.appimagehub.com

[lebensterben]

one idea is to use NixOS with custom build flag. It's declarative so easily deployable almost everywhere and it has the largest software repository.

I asked ChatGPT on how to use the optimization flags. (It will be very time consuming.)

https://chatgpt.com/share/68838224-4a70-800d-b2f2-c9f72c36b37c

---

another idea is to use CachyOS or add their repository to ArchLinux

https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/

their packages are built with optimization.

[lebensterben]

FlakeHub can be used to cache NixOS flake builds. So theoretically you can convert the recipe for building packages to NixOS flake, and then hook up CI with FlakeHub Cache. It only needs to be built once and subsequent built of the same flake (with identical hash) will just retrieve the built artifacts.

Problem is it costs 20 USD per user per month.

This is better than CachyOS in that

• It has much a bigger repository
• It's declarative and deployable easily
• It's not stateless but easily recoverable to previous builds of OS

Downside:

• Hard to learn NixOS and the configuration language
• Monetary cost

[paulcarroty]

• AerynOS:
  • closest to Clear by philosophy & use stateless
  • with x86_64-v3+ optimizations
  • complicated package format with bad documentation
  • requires CLA for PRs
  • no 3rd-party repositories support yet
• NixOS:
  • no x86_64-v3+ optimizations
  • very complex package format
  • comiling & testing tons of libraries is very time & money consuming.
• CachyOS:
  • with x86_64-v3+ optimizations
  • relatively simple package format with good documentation.

[lebensterben]

do you think you can make Arkane Linux to use Cachy OS packages?

https://docs.arkanelinux.org

Arkane is immutable (different but shares some similarities as stateless).

[paulcarroty]

Yeah, it supports pacman & Arch package format. And there's similar problem to AerynOS: small user base. So it makes sense to target Arch, Cachy, Manjaro, etc.

[lebensterben]

I've not used Arkane Linux. I don't know how they achieved immutability. So using third party repositories for other Arch-based distributions may need extra patches.