Intel's Clear Linux OS is Lightning...and I Mean Lightning Fast.

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

On 07/09/2023 at 22:29, JustGeorge said:

Still, I'd have all the machines run Mint, if I could. The ones that were, were repurposed older machines that Windows would choke on. 

I think that's where you got it from. Older machines are different. PSU's these days are more efficent than 10 years ago.

[+Warwagon MVC]

On 18/08/2022 at 07:05, spacelordmaster said:

I have a laptop that I used as a guinea pig to test different Linux Distros so I decided to give Clear Linux OS a shot after reading so many good things about it and looking at benchmarks compared to the rest of the distros out there and let me tell you, those reports are not lying. This distro is lightning fast. My Intel i5 guinea pig loves it. I am loving it.

 

https://clearlinux.org/

 

 

In a few minutes, I'm going to be installing it on an AIO computer, to give it a looksies.

Alright, I gave it a try

The preinstalled Firefox was glitchy AF .. just a white screen.

I clicked on Firefox info and was taken to the store to install it. Which is weird because it was already installed.

I clicked install, and it installed and worked great, but then I had 2 Firefoxes installed.

I understand one was the store version and one was the nonstore version but I looked all around the OS and found no way to uninstall it.

Yes, I Know if I ran some terminal command it would probably have worked, but I was using this in the perspective of the average user.

Also the bottom bar not showing up unless you hover or click activities in the top left was annoying af. I clicked around settings trying to find how to turn off that default behavior. I couldn't find anything.

On a positive note, it did boot fast.

 

[protocol7]

On 08/09/2023 at 15:37, Warwagon said:

Also the bottom bar not showing up unless you hover or click activities in the top left was annoying af. I clicked around settings trying to find how to turn off that default behavior. I couldn't find anything.

On a positive note, it did boot fast.

Gnome is all about extensions. You can browse and install them with the Extension Manager app. "Dash to Dock" will give you a permanent dock like the one you get when you hit Activities. "Dash to Panel" will give you a Windows-style taskbar instead.

I found Gnome a little weird at first but I've gotten used to it now. I recently installed another extension called "No overview at start-up" which gives me a desktop window at startup rather than the overview window. I have my three most used apps as the first three apps pinned to the dock. So I just have to hold down the Windows (or Super as they call it in Linuxville) key and tap the 1, 2 and 3 keys to launch them.

 

Edited September 8, 2023 by protocol7

[Brandon H Supervisor]

On 08/09/2023 at 11:45, protocol7 said:

Gnome is all about extensions. You can browse and install them with the Extension Manager app. "Dash to Dock" will give you a permanent dock like the one you get when you hit Activities. "Dash to Panel" will give you a Windows-style taskbar instead.

I found Gnome a little weird at first but I've gotten used to it now. I recently installed another extension called "No overview at start-up" which gives me a desktop window at startup rather than the overview window. I have my three most used apps as the first three apps pinned to the dock. So I just have to hold down the Windows (or Super as they call it in Linuxville) key and tap the 1, 2 and 3 keys to launch them.

 

yeah Gnome has come a long way thanks to extensions. Just wish updates didn't require log out for them. Is annoying sometimes when I'm doing system updates and a reboot is needed; I'll reboot and log in to a 'extension updates available. log out to apply' notification popup ... is silly.

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

On 08/09/2023 at 11:54, Brandon H said:

yeah Gnome has come a long way thanks to extensions. Just wish updates didn't require log out for them. Is annoying sometimes when I'm doing system updates and a reboot is needed; I'll reboot and log in to a 'extension updates available. log out to apply' notification popup ... is silly.

Least it doesn't nag you like Windows..

[JustGeorge]

On 08/09/2023 at 10:37, Warwagon said:

In a few minutes, I'm going to be installing it on an AIO computer, to give it a looksies.

Alright, I gave it a try

The preinstalled Firefox was glitchy AF .. just a white screen.

I clicked on Firefox info and was taken to the store to install it. Which is weird because it was already installed.

I clicked install, and it installed and worked great, but then I had 2 Firefoxes installed.

I understand one was the store version and one was the nonstore version but I looked all around the OS and found no way to uninstall it.

Yes, I Know if I ran some terminal command it would probably have worked, but I was using this in the perspective of the average user.

Also the bottom bar not showing up unless you hover or click activities in the top left was annoying af. I clicked around settings trying to find how to turn off that default behavior. I couldn't find anything.

On a positive note, it did boot fast.

 

I agree that its pretty dumb to hide a dock by default. From a new user perspective, that would be a frustration, cause how would you know to hover the curser over the bottom to see it?

You can unhide the dock in gnome settings, I think.

That's Gnome though...All about obfuscation and simplicity and minimalism to a fault. A experienced user can figure things out and work around learning hurdles like this. Average Joe will say WTH? and download another distro  or give up. Most people don't have time for forced ideologies. I don't hate Gnome, really. I can work with it, same as any other DE. There are things I like/hate with all of them. 

[Tomoko]

On 07/09/2023 at 20:35, adrynalyne said:

Terrible article. I stopped reading once it contradicted itself. That’s ignoring that it used a lot of text to say very little in the way of specifics. 
 

Contradiction:

”On the other hand, NTFS does not provide any encryption options but instead relies on Windows’ built-in user authentication system to protect its contents from unauthorized access attempts.”

Then further down:

“For instance, both offer encryption capabilities (EFS in Windows/NTFS and eCryptfs in Linux/Ext4); however, only NTFS provides built-in support for user authentication.”

👎

It also said NTFS was based on FAT32...what? FAT32 didn't even exist yet when it was created. Now maybe he meant FAT16 but wasn't NTFS based on HPFS from OS/2?

[+Warwagon MVC]

Tried Ubuntu with a gnome theme. Never knew Linux could look so pretty. I've seen the other ones, Mint, Element, all of those but they still always looked like Linux.

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

On 11/09/2023 at 10:56, Warwagon said:

 

Tried Ubuntu with a gnome theme. Never knew Linux could look so pretty. I've seen the other ones, Mint, Element, all of those but they still always looked like Linux.

KDE is different, too..

[Good Bot, Bad Bot]

On 07/09/2023 at 20:54, JustGeorge said:

I have noticed in recent past that ext4 doesn't seem very tolerant of hard shutdowns/reboots. Say the power goes out. You power up, and your OS no longer boots unless you run tools to fix the FS. Had some kids at my workplace kill power to some Mint desktops and had this happen. Usually NTFS just recovers and trucks along. 

I am currently using ext4 (Ubuntu 23.04) on my main box and recently was having the power shut off in our apartment almost every day for electrical work to be done in the building for almost two weeks. I forget to shutdown my PC a couple of times before going to work but had no problems booting it up again.

[FateTrap]

On 07/09/2023 at 20:35, KaoDome said:

I don't mean to start any flame war, but, what is it that makes Ext4 much better than NTFS?

On Linux Ext4 is pretty much the one I use, I don't have needs that require Btrfs or ZFS for example, but NTFS is just fine for me too on Windows and for cross Linux/Windows scenarios, even ACLs work fine.

For storage the Linux systems with EXT4 were much faster still than Windows 10 with the long-standing NTFS file-system.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with its XFS+Btrfs configuration came in between the EXT4 and Windows results for this very common embedded database library.

 

HAMMER2 is normally going to be even faster than all these Linux file systems for SQLite.

Overall, ZFS is the most finished, powerful and reliable file system. ZFS is also faster than NTFS as the PS5 loads most games significantly faster than a Xbox.

The PS5 is based on FreeBSD, the system with the fastest and best ZFS implementation.

Something that gets talked about a lot is when you lose power. ZFS is your best weapon for this kind of situation and it is many times better than UFS in this area.

ZFS can ensure that an extremely powerful server under 100% load has no data loss during a power outage. EXT4 cannot guarantee anything at all in this area.

 

Some comments give me the impression that many people think you can only use GNOME on Clear Linux.
You also have: xfce4-desktop, bspwm, sway, i3, awesome and LXQt. Some of those packages are deprecated but you have several good options.

 

I also found this interesting review --> Intel's Clear Linux: First Impressions

https://dev--jeremymorgan.netlify.app/blog/linux/intel-clear-linux-review/

I suspected some performance differences within reason and Geekbench shows that.
None of these results surprised me, and fit within what I would expect for software only optimizations.

However, the next thing I did was a “Blender Render” of the BMW, a popular test of machines. I rendered this image with Blender.
Under Windows 10: Time to render: 13:31.21
Under Clear Linux: Time to render: 05:49.88

This seems so drastic I’ve asked the Clear Linux team about it because it seems so drastic. I’ll update this article when I find out more.
But overall in my Geekbench tests I see a difference in performance.
I suspect this is mostly due to power profile adjustment and optimizations for the CPU that are built into Clear.

Edited October 12, 2023 by FateTrap

[KaoDome]

On 12/10/2023 at 15:29, FateTrap said:

 

Oh! I see, thanks!

However, comparing filesystem implementations across different OSes doesn't strike me as particularly useful...? Certainly not something I'd take into consideration on its own. In that ext4 vs NTFS graph, I see at least Linux and NT (is it called that these days?), does it not play a part on the outcome? For example, of it were about process creation, the Linux way of doing it is way faster compared to Window's kernel, but (I hope 😅) we don't say Linux is better than Windows because it can spawn processes like crazy compared to the latter.

Another thing that came to mind, you mentioned ZFS being great and guaranteeing no data loss on sudden power failure, so its primitives are atomic in nature, right? Something either happens, or doesn't (I can't think of another way otherwise). Wouldn't that make it slower vs. some other that weren't on writes at least? If pure speed was the metric, perhaps write heavy loads wouldn't benefit from that (assuming there was something else to compare against in an apples to apples deal), with power failure scenarios being quantified and risk/benefits evaluated (redundant PSU sometimes even more than just 2 are commonplace in server land, same goes for UPSes, diesel generators, etc.)

 

My question about why ext4 (or NTFS) was better than the other was more about the way they are defined perhaps, in case the answer was inherent to the design and not related to an implementation (say, NTFS on Linux via FUSE vs. the older in-kernel implementation vs. Paragon's, etc.).

Overall it was just a curiosity of mine, I wondered if there was something in any of them truly amazing, and if so, how come no other subsequent FS included that in their design. Reiser comes to mind for some reason... 😔

 

As for that render test... No idea, never worked on anything like it. Was the Windows build of Blender a standard one and Clear's some Intel built? Many years ago, Intel already had advanced libraries for math and accelerated primitives using advanced instruction sets (to the point of being unfair to other manufacturer that also supported those instructions), if I had to guess, I'd say Intel is making use of all they can on their builds (again, kernel differs to begin with) leading to faster executions.

I remember even free mp3 encoders benefited from being built with Intel's compilers back in the day (Rarewares was building LAME with it, I was just using it 😅), but these days some colleagues tell me Intel moved their compiling to Clang, some custom version perhaps too, but they are no longer rolling it all themselves.

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

On 12/10/2023 at 14:29, FateTrap said:

Overall, ZFS is the most finished, powerful and reliable file system. ZFS is also faster than NTFS as the PS5 loads most games significantly faster than a Xbox.

The PS5 is based on FreeBSD, the system with the fastest and best ZFS implementation.

I can contradict you and make a good argument for the Xbox.

However many things are going to influence game load times before the file system in my opinion.

I suspect it really depends on the game and which console was the lead development platform, the speed of the storage device is also going to play a major part also.

Then you have the functionality of the operating system making smart use of resources it has available, for example quick resume on the Xbox essentially dumping the ram to the SSD so you can play other games, then come back another time and essentially load the game and resume playing significantly faster.

If you wish to build an enterprise grade NAS, then yes that is where ZFS really shines, that is the main situation for me where filesystem would actually be a consideration.

[margrave]

I couldn't get clear linux to boot in vmware workstation. Just boots to a black screen with the Xwindows cursor.

[cork1958]

Just tried running the live version of this and although it did seem extremely fast, even on a computer that still has an HDD, everything almost worked perfectly except when I tried to open Firefox all I got was a white space and was unable to do anything with the browser. Not done playing with it totally but will have to try later to get it to work, maybe.

[FateTrap]

On 12/10/2023 at 19:46, KaoDome said:

Another thing that came to mind, you mentioned ZFS being great and guaranteeing no data loss on sudden power failure, so its primitives are atomic in nature, right? Something either happens, or doesn't (I can't think of another way otherwise). Wouldn't that make it slower vs. some other that weren't on writes at least? If pure speed was the metric, perhaps write heavy loads wouldn't benefit from that (assuming there was something else to compare against in an apples to apples deal), with power failure scenarios being quantified and risk/benefits evaluated (redundant PSU sometimes even more than just 2 are commonplace in server land, same goes for UPSes, diesel generators, etc.)

Along one side, theoretically, ZFS should be slower because it has much more advanced features than EXT4 and NTFS.

But theory and practice are not always the same. I once benchmarked this and the twenty apps I tested at the time started on average just slightly faster on FreeBSD than on Linux systems. So specifically on FreeBSD, ZFS is very well optimized.

https://redbyte.eu/en/blog/postgresql-benchmark-freebsd-centos-ubuntu-debian-opensuse/

I was positively surprised by FreeBSD 11.1 which was more than twice as fast as the best performing Linux, despite the fact that FreeBSD used ZFS which is a copy-on-write file system. I assumed that such a difference was caused by the Linux software RAID overhead, so I did three more TCP-B benchmarks for 100 concurrent clients, this time without software RAID. The results show the inefficiency of the Linux SW RAID (or ZFS RAID efficiency).

On 12/10/2023 at 19:46, KaoDome said:

However, comparing filesystem implementations across different OSes doesn't strike me as particularly useful...? Certainly not something I'd take into consideration on its own.

Those are just the comparisons that are useful. Suppose you are going to measure the performance of NTFS on Linux then your comparison is completely worthless because Linux has a worse NTFS implementation that is not on par with windows.

How ZFS continues to be better than btrfs https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/ways-in-which-zfs-is-better-than-btrfs

A useful feature of ZFS, for example, is compression. It can do very powerful compression (around 50%), and operations on the compressed files are usually faster. NTFS on the other hand can only do 15% compression, and then unlike ZFS you have a strong performance degradation.

There is nothing currently in existence that can guarantee data integrity in a way that is equivalent to ZFS. By which, indeed, I mean that no other file system can currently store data in a completely reliable manner.

On 13/10/2023 at 11:49, InsaneNutter said:

I can contradict you and make a good argument for the Xbox.

Let's see if it matters if the games you mention load fast or slow:

https://www.metacritic.com/game/star-wars-jedi-survivor/user-reviews/

If I can be very honest, this game is not worth the name Star Wars. The main character looks more like a plumber than a Jedi.

Yep, series X performs 15-20% worse than ps5 in Star Wars Jedi Survivor.

For another test, we also measured the time to get from the launch icon on the consoles’ respective dashboards to the start menu, hitting start to bypass the opening cinematic.

    PlayStation 5: 19.52 seconds
    Xbox Series X: 41.98 seconds

The hell? Double the load time? It seems the Xbox Series X took a little longer checking my network environment than the PS5 (it visibly lingered on the checking network screen), and there’s an extra prompt (press A on your controller) to go through.

Devil May Cry 5

    PlayStation 5: 4.01 seconds
    Xbox Series X: 5.59 seconds
    Xbox Series S: 6.95 seconds

Here are times from the consoles’ UI icons to the main menu:

    PlayStation 5: 14.43 seconds
    Xbox Series X: 22.81 seconds

Why is Xbox Series X download speeds so much slower than the PS5?

Saw a two year old thread on this looking for answers. It’s so weird. I get around 300-400mbps on my PS5, which can drop to about 100-200 when I’m playing an online game. The Xbox does go over 50 so far and when I’m playing a single player game without using the internet, it drops to like 5. I was hoping for a fix. Guess I just have to download new games overnight. Gonna suck when Starfield drops lol. Suppose I’ll just play the PS while that downloads.

 

[JustGeorge]

On 13/10/2023 at 17:42, FateTrap said:

Along one side, theoretically, ZFS should be slower because it has much more advanced features than EXT4 and NTFS.

But theory and practice are not always the same. I once benchmarked this and the twenty apps I tested at the time started on average just slightly faster on FreeBSD than on Linux systems. So specifically on FreeBSD, ZFS is very well optimized.

https://redbyte.eu/en/blog/postgresql-benchmark-freebsd-centos-ubuntu-debian-opensuse/

I was positively surprised by FreeBSD 11.1 which was more than twice as fast as the best performing Linux, despite the fact that FreeBSD used ZFS which is a copy-on-write file system. I assumed that such a difference was caused by the Linux software RAID overhead, so I did three more TCP-B benchmarks for 100 concurrent clients, this time without software RAID. The results show the inefficiency of the Linux SW RAID (or ZFS RAID efficiency).

Those are just the comparisons that are useful. Suppose you are going to measure the performance of NTFS on Linux then your comparison is completely worthless because Linux has a worse NTFS implementation that is not on par with windows.

How ZFS continues to be better than btrfs https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/ways-in-which-zfs-is-better-than-btrfs

A useful feature of ZFS, for example, is compression. It can do very powerful compression (around 50%), and operations on the compressed files are usually faster. NTFS on the other hand can only do 15% compression, and then unlike ZFS you have a strong performance degradation.

There is nothing currently in existence that can guarantee data integrity in a way that is equivalent to ZFS. By which, indeed, I mean that no other file system can currently store data in a completely reliable manner.

Let's see if it matters if the games you mention load fast or slow:

https://www.metacritic.com/game/star-wars-jedi-survivor/user-reviews/

If I can be very honest, this game is not worth the name Star Wars. The main character looks more like a plumber than a Jedi.

Yep, series X performs 15-20% worse than ps5 in Star Wars Jedi Survivor.

For another test, we also measured the time to get from the launch icon on the consoles’ respective dashboards to the start menu, hitting start to bypass the opening cinematic.

    PlayStation 5: 19.52 seconds
    Xbox Series X: 41.98 seconds

The hell? Double the load time? It seems the Xbox Series X took a little longer checking my network environment than the PS5 (it visibly lingered on the checking network screen), and there’s an extra prompt (press A on your controller) to go through.

Devil May Cry 5

    PlayStation 5: 4.01 seconds
    Xbox Series X: 5.59 seconds
    Xbox Series S: 6.95 seconds

Here are times from the consoles’ UI icons to the main menu:

    PlayStation 5: 14.43 seconds
    Xbox Series X: 22.81 seconds

Why is Xbox Series X download speeds so much slower than the PS5?

Saw a two year old thread on this looking for answers. It’s so weird. I get around 300-400mbps on my PS5, which can drop to about 100-200 when I’m playing an online game. The Xbox does go over 50 so far and when I’m playing a single player game without using the internet, it drops to like 5. I was hoping for a fix. Guess I just have to download new games overnight. Gonna suck when Starfield drops lol. Suppose I’ll just play the PS while that downloads.

Speaking from total ignorance, but I thought the integrity benefits of ZFS were diminished without ECC RAM?

[spaceelf]

While the console dicussion is generally ###### with people cherry picking results, touting functionality that isn't any different in the competition, or etc as far as the wifi goes the Series boxes are definitively terrible.  I haven't heard the PS5s is good either, though.