// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
This Dev Spent 8 Years on Intel's Clear Linux, Now He's Undoing Its Biggest Mistake
Auke Kok spent eight years working on Clear Linux OS at Intel. Now he thinks he knows exactly what broke it, and he's trying to fix that by himself.
In a LinkedIn post this week, Auke, now a Linux Distribution Architect at Verge.io, introduced The Ur Project. It's a from-scratch Linux distribution build system he's been putting together in whatever spare time he has.
"This project is not a corporate effort," he writes, and as far as I can see, no company, or even foundation for that matter, is backing it. Besides, as you might remember, Intel discontinued Clear Linux OS last year.
Auke has been writing regularly on The Ur Project website about what he thinks went wrong the first time. The biggest one, in his own words, was that they "made it way too hard for the community to contribute."
Simple things, like testing his own code change or carrying out regular incremental development, were needlessly painful, he says.
The release process didn't help either. Mismatched dashboards and a combination of old and new tooling were bolted together just to track daily updates.
Keeping pace with an assortment of daily updates meant stitching together a growing pile of disconnected tools and interfaces, all running on CDN and hardware resources a solo project at this stage will never have access to.
The Ur Project isn't meant to be some shiny new atomic distro, at least not yet. The priority right now is to work on the machinery behind it, not offer a polished product.
Everything runs on Rust, on both the part that builds packages and the part that installs them, sharing the same underlying code.
Packages are defined through what Auke calls recipes, declarative TOML files that describe what a package needs without prescribing exactly how to build it, an idea he compares to "your grandmother's collection of cooking recipes."