Even with a $199 Laptop, Clear Linux Can Offer Superior Performance
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
Clear Linux OS sets the CPU governor to performance which calls for the CPU to operate at maximum clock frequency. In other words, P-state P0. While this may sound wasteful at first, it is important to remember that power utilization does not increase significantly simply because of a locked clock frequency without a workload.
from: https://docs.01.org/clearlinux/latest/guides/maintenance/cpu...
The only reference in the article for this is in the compiler details box, where you can see that all the distributions run the ondemand governor, and Clear runs with performance.
Phoronix also could have change the governor and benchmark using the same governor, but for some reason he choose not to. This isn't the first time he does it, the comparison is a repeated theme in a series of articles he made. Unless I miss something, which very well could be, this doesn't reflect well on the site professional credibility.
> By default, thermald is disabled in Clear Linux OS.
It sounds like the catch is that your computer will happily fry itself.
I hate those things though. I disabled all of those thermal and laptop mode management daemons on my Fedora laptop. I ran a CPU stress while manually tweaking the Intel RAPL settings until I found the 80C limit and just set that on boot. I also wrote into the boot scripts the powertop settings that I liked.
Even without RAPL settings the laptop won't fry itself. You can see the machine check events in dmesg as the CPU hits 90-95C and throttles.
I had a W520 Thinkpad that would shut off if it got too hot and wouldn't enter to BIOS until it cooled.
(Probably is true of many laptops; that one seemed to frequently overheat on me during intensive, prolonged compilations.)
(1) keep boost frequencies running as long as possible.
(2) keep your fan from constantly turning off and on.
Your system has its own fan speed curve & power envelope that works no matter what the system is doing. Not having thermald does not somehow cause your system to overheat (for example many AMD systems aren't support)
Turning thermald off is Intel signally that they have an on-silicon/in-kernel/in-EFI/partner guidance method that now does as equal or better job.
There is also various compiler tuning, a number of patches to different components, using PGO + LTO compiler optimizations, and much more.
The reason that this irritates me is that after stumbling on one of those comparisons I was puzzled how could this be and was thinking maybe I should switch. I went to Clear's websites and read through the whole thing until I understood that thank you, this is nice but not for me. While this was educating, it was also waste of my time. My view is that good tech journalism should save me time, not the opposite.
AFAICT, what thermald gains you is a smoother degradation of performance; it starts throttling earlier and more gradually than would happen otherwise. It's not obvious to me that there's any actual benefit of this; thermal limits are what they are, and you pay the price eventually if you really need all those cycles. Whether my system is slightly slower for a longer period of time or much slower for a shorter period of time doesn't really seem terribly significant.
It's not that I think that Clear is a stupid unnecessary project or anything like that, it is actually quite interesting experimental work. But it an experimental project and most people doesn't want something that avant-garde as their daily driver.
> - Switching to the P-State "performance" governor on Ubuntu 18.10 only allowed it to win over Clear Linux in an extra 5 benchmarks... Clear Linux still came out ahead 66% of the time against Ubuntu either out-of-the-box or with the performance governor.
(1) https://askubuntu.com/questions/1021748/set-cpu-governor-to-...
Edit: I tried it. Didn't make any noticable difference to me except fan is making a constant loud noise. FWIW, Webpack still takes the same time to compile (not even difference of 100ms before and after).
const char doc[] = "Power Tweaks -- adjusts runtime kernel options for optimal power and performance";One thing that it often works against is latency, because it takes time to wake up things that are sleeping. But that is really not something you should care about if you're using a laptop. Your laptop is not servicing Google search results.
In practice it works really nicely for what I use it for. A temporary portable computing device that isn't my main workstation but still gets a lot of use.
[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Vega-HDMI-Front-RAM-Rose-FHD-4GB-...
Not saying it wasn't $200 at the time he bought it, just saying that he might've bought it on sale (there was probably a bunch of Linux enthusiasts clamoring, "There's a laptop on sale for $200 at Wal-Mart that can run Linux!"); it doesn't appear to be its retail price anymore.
Who else finds that animations/smooth scrolling just breaks the flow/gets in the way?
It improves ux by hiding the latency behind visual transformations.
- Smooth scrolling that's actually smooth and fast gives you immediate feedback on where the last line you were reading is. There's no guesswork in "how much did that page jump down exactly" anymore.
- Smooth scrolling which is laggy and bouncy doesn't remove the confusion and may add to it instead.
For animation example:
- A quick (even 3-frame) animation for minimising a window doesn't delay you, but gives you information: where is your window now on the taskbar, and the action indeed happened (if you have 2 similar documents opened and the window just disappears, it may not be clear)
- A slow, fancy animation that rolls up your window just introduces delay and distracts from the task, even if it provides the benefits above.
Finally, useless animation, especially connected to the accelerometer, can induce motion sickness, so sometimes it's worth making it less smooth/much faster. We can still register 2-3 frame blinks as something specific happening.
As usual, there's a lot of grey area in between having animation, or not.
I usually keep about 5-7 pinned tabs open (Gmail, Contact, Calendar, Keep, Drive, HackerNews, etc) and cycle through ~3-7 transient tabs, and I find that the browsing experience is not enjoyable on 4GB machines anymore.
Does it still, are you referring to 70+? Firefox 70 in October came with big improvements[1], I didn't do any testing though. I think I saw some benchmarks showing it's slightly worse than Chrome, but it was minor. Can't find them right now unfortunately.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/firefox-70-brings-en...
It is deeply psychologically jarring, but Firefox runs through the Android and I think Linux compat layers on a Chromebook just fine. I have no idea how much this actually buys you when the OS is by Google for running Chrome, but it does work.
Any other cheap machines worth considering? This was fantastic given build quality, fanless m3 Intel CPU and all Intel components.
What applications do you run that make it so bad for you?
But maybe your workflow doesn't include compilation?
I have Clear Linux running on a Haswell Core i7 and it's great, but it doesn't run on a Core2Duo I've got laying around.
Also, it needs EFI booting - not sure yours is new enough for that.
The hardware is old, sure, but I don't need it badly enough to justify building/buying something else and I had it laying around from the mid-2000's when I was testing WiMAX rollout in my city. Figured it would get a bit more use instead of living on the "old hardware" shelf (shelves) in the basement.
Never had this problem on Debian Linux, FWIW - even when upgrading to a new release. Of course sometimes stuff gets marginally slower due to new security mitigations or whatever, but not in a way that's even perceptible, let alone catastrophic.
https://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-ma...
I believe that the main reason applications run faster is that it determines which exact CPU you have and compiles everything with the flags that enable every optimization that your CPU can handle.
Edit:
Look here:
Under 'features' it says the following:
> Intel Optimized > Highly tuned for Intel platforms where all optimization is turned on by default.
It makes me really sad that other distros are not following Clear's lead here.
If you want everything micro-optimized to your particular system's hardware configuration, you know where to find Gentoo.
But yes, I agree it would be nice if other distros had two amd64 releases; one that targeted newer hardware, and another for lowest-common denominator.
[1] https://cdn.download.clearlinux.org/releases/32250/clear/x86...
Also, I'm curious if Clear Linux is also fast on hardware that is slow not because it is cheap but because it is old. Would it speed up my Core2Duo laptop?
Could it be that Windows just eats more base memory than Linux, and the benchmark apps do not have enough memory to run under Windows?