Former Intel Engineer Who Was One Of The Clear Linux Architects Is Starting A New Distro

One of the former Intel engineers who was a Linux OS architect on their legendary Clear Linux distribution and before that also driving their Moblin and MeeGo Linux efforts is starting a new distribution project. This new initiative, named The Ur Project, is highly leveraging Rust and will rely on AI/LLMs in part and aims to incorporate some deisng improvements Clear Linux. Auke Kok is the former Intel engineer starting The Ur Project and leveraging his 17+ years at Intel working on Moblin / MeeGo / Tizen and Clear Linux before leaving the chip giant in 2023. The wonderful memories of Intel's former Linux distribution efforts over the past two decades: As for using his vast Linux distribution experience and building The Ur Project, Auke Kok wrote in a LinkedIn post about his new initiative: "The goal for this project is to build a mature Linux Distribution building software stack that allows users and companies to build their own secure distro, and share in a distributed way whatever parts they want to share or borrow from each other. The threshold to participate and make packages, or even run your own repo will be very low. What you make out of it is your choice: You can use it to build an embedded OS, or a desktop OS with or without atomic updates, containers, whatever you want. At least this is the intent. What's it about? Here's a few keywords describing some of the features: Reproducible builds. Solid provenance. Built in Rust, both producer and consumer sides. Composition is a layer - installation and package management are the same thing and share code. TUF - the update framework. Capable of staging large amounts of package changes. Package designer MCP. Share your repos, rebuild, mix, securely. Content wise: 1000+ OSS projects packaged, including GNOME and Xfce4. Building images. Package management." Before getting too excited about it, there isn't any deliverables yet. So far it's just laying out his ideas for this new Linux distribution as he begins working on the infrastructure for bringing it up. As for differing from the former Intel Clear Linux platform, Auke explained in a post: "In Clear Linux OS we made several mistakes. Not the delta-based updates, that was a perfectly reasonable architectural step up. In many ways it was right for the time, and it worked really well. What I'm specifically extremely aware of that I feel was the biggest "sin" of Clear Linux OS, was that we made it way too hard for the community to contribute. Like, easily defensible it was silly difficult to have normal, healthy software development integration flows, do iterative development, and to have a quick and easy way to test your own code changes. We also bolted things on top of things to make our release flow work. Dashboards here and there. Mixed frameworks and old and new software all attempting to control the yellow river of dozens of daily software updates and trying to wrangle them all. I'd sure love to have the CDN budget we had. And all the preprod hardware to make things go zoom and try cool new things. By the time the Clear Linux OS project was already building down and people were put on different groups with in the company, that's when there finally was a sizeable community working on user contributions. It takes time for that sort of thing to grow." It will be interesting to follow along on the progress of The Ur Project. Those wanting to read more about some of the early technical plans and thinking going into this project can be found via the early posts on ur.foo-projects.org.