The notice was written by Arjan van de Ven, who among other things is Intel’s senior principal engineer of the Linux Kernel. He was announcing the ignoble demise of the Linux distribution Clear Linux OS. The chipmaker had just pulled the plug without warning while the patient was still breathing.
“Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS, and the Clear Linux OS GitHub repository will be archived in read-only mode,” he said. “So, if you’re currently using Clear Linux OS, we strongly recommend planning your migration to another actively maintained Linux distribution as soon as possible to ensure ongoing security and stability.”
This left many — from computer labs who use it in experiments to Fortune 500 companies who run it in their cloud-native infrastructures to tech hobbyists — scrambling to figure out what to do next.
“Seriously? No grace period, users are supposed to instantly migrate?” Liam Proven quoted one user saying in The Register. “That’s not very serious honestly.”
This is a problem of Linux, I have had my OS shutdown overnight three times. What surprises me is this was by a major corporation, Intel, not a one man developer OS. This is serious for many as Clear Linux ran servers and the cloud. I can’t imagine how those who run servers and the cloud are going to react to this happening. Will this push them to MS Windows? I hope not.