Recently, Intel announced that it will shut down Clear Linux, its Linux distro that was meant for more specialized activities like cloud computing, distributed computing, and highly optimized for Intel hardware.
While the company did not provide a reason for the shutdown, it is reasonable to assume it was due to cost-cutting. Now, Kaisen Linux, another specialized Linux distro, is headed for the graveyard.
The announcement came recently, bundled with news about the release of Rolling 3.0, the project"s final version. In the blog post detailing the release, Kevin Chevreuil, the creator of Kaisen Linux, said that new personal and professional projects are taking up his time.
I would like to begin this blog post by announcing the end of the Kaisen Linux project with this latest release. I wish to embark on other professional and personal projects that will take up a considerable amount of my time, and for this reason, I can no longer continue developing Kaisen Linux. This release will therefore be the last.
For those who never used it, Kaisen Linux was a Linux distro designed specifically for IT professionals and shipped with a massive set of tools for system rescue, administration, and network diagnostics.
It offered different desktop environments like KDE Plasma, LXQt, MATE, and Xfce. The distribution also had a "toram" mode which loaded the entire operating system into RAM, freeing up the USB port.
The announcement also detailed the final version"s new features. This last version uses the recently released Debian Trixie (Debian 13) as a base. Chevreuil removed a number of tools, including the popular neofetch utility, as well as dmraid, hping3, and the reiser4progs file system utilities.
This release also makes KDE Plasma 6 the default desktop environment and replaces the LightDM display manager with SDDM. Chevreuil mentioned that previous customization issues with SDDM were resolved in KDE 6, prompting the switch. Other changes and bug fixes are outlined below:
- The
apt upgradecommand now redirects toapt full-upgradeto prevent system breakage. - A new
kaisen-timeshift-fast-restorecommand allows for one-command BTRFS snapshot restoration. - ZFS management tools and the kernel module are now fully supported.
- The centralized manpages now include over 1705 pages, with fixed links and new categories.
- The installer"s automatic partitioning now only offers separating / and /home to protect the snapshot feature.
- GPG keys have been updated and are functional until 2029.
While the end of any project is disappointing, the situation is definitely better than what"s happening with Clear Linux. Unlike the latter, which will receive no further security patches from Intel, Kaisen Linux offers up to two years of security updates. Chevreuil believes this will give users enough time to migrate to a new system.