#Perfectly clear desktop software#

Then I installed and configured the NTP daemon on both VMs to bring their clocks to within a millisecond of one another and installed my own whenits scheduling utility. To test that theory, I brought an Ubuntu 18.04.4 VM and a Clear Linux VM up side by side, each with four vCPUs and 4GB of RAM allocated. That is to say, even if Clear Linux benchmarks faster at a task relevant to desktop performance, the difference may be easily overwhelmed by differences in the desktop-or the specific application package-itself.

#Perfectly clear desktop software#

This type of benchmark correlates better to changes in hardware than to changes in software at the distribution level. We should also point out that the majority of Phoronix's benchmarks focus on long-running computational or storage tasks. A typical observer-one not actually timing things-faced with an hour-long task that completed in 40 minutes will think 'hey, that seemed fast.' The same observer, waiting for a one second task to complete, will generally start frowning around 1,300ms. Without a point of reference for comparison-a watched and ticking timer or a head-to-head race-most people won't notice less than 33% difference in the time to complete a familiar task.

But winning benchmarks isn't necessarily the same thing as feeling fast. Phoronix has already done plenty of those-and yes, without a doubt, Clear Linux is faster on average than most distros. (If you're not used to Gnome3, click and drag up to dismiss the lock screen.) Post-installation: The GIMP raceįor the most part, there didn't seem like a lot of point in doing traditional performance benchmarks on Clear Linux. Once you've selected your options, Clear shouldn't take more than a few minutes total to actually install-but if you walk away and come back, it's worth realizing that the screen saver lock screen may kick in on you. The question not addressed here is, what's it like to run Clear Linux as a daily driver? We were curious, so we took it for a spin. There's not much question that Clear Linux is your best bet if you want to turn in the best possible benchmark numbers. When attempting to conglomerate all test results into a single geometric mean, Larabel found that the distribution's results were, on average, 14% faster than the slowest distributions tested (CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 18.04.3). Recently at Phoronix, Michael Larabel tested a Threadripper 3990X system using nine different Linux distros, one of which was Clear Linux-and Intel's distribution got three times as many first-place results as any other distro tested. Although the distribution was created and is managed by Intel, even AMD recommends running benchmarks of its new CPUs under Clear Linux in order to get the highest scores. Intel's Clear Linux distribution has been getting a lot of attention lately, due to its incongruously high benchmark performance.