What is clear doing that is unique and what are the trade offs?
Why isn’t this mainstreamed into other distros?
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Clear Linux was maintained by Intel and specifically tuned to Intel hardware. The speed enhancement it has over other distros is only possible on a very limited set of hardware.
Interesting - is that kernel level thing? Could other distros use that on the right hardware or is too much to maintain multiple kernels that are that hardware specific?
The mentioned performance governor runs the CPU permanently at maximum frequency, which is obviously bad on battery powered devices and on devices with lacking thermal headroom. I think it might cause problems in virtualized environments as well but I'm not sure about that.
Ubuntu 25.04 on this server defaults to the intel_cpufreq scaling driver with the "schedutil" governor. Ubuntu still frustratingly defaults to schedutil or powersave governors even on servers... A rather silly default many will argue.
Seems like this accounts for most of the difference from their charts, but still, cool
what a good improvement