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.

Where Clear Linux fell short

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.

A build system, not a distro

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."

Build steps aren't scripted by hand. Instead, a set of probes inspects the source and decides how to compile it. Repositories run on TUF to keep updates signed and verifiable, with content-addressed storage handling deduplication so identical files across packages only get stored once.

Every package carries provenance data documenting how it was built, and Auke says the system is designed so builds can be reproduced bit for bit. The same underlying system can output an OCI container, a live USB image, a cloud image, or a plain installed system.

AI is involved

LLMs are only tasked with writing test suites and build definitions for specific package types.

The build system itself stays deterministic. It runs without any AI agent present, and MCP integrations were deliberately kept out of routine packaging work.

For now, what's available is the website, Auke's regular blog posts on The Ur Project, and the Forgejo instance that hosts the code.

He is currently in the process of figuring out the hosting, letting people actually pull images and repositories. That will take a few more days before it's ready.

Once that's sorted, he plans to publish bootable images for both cloud deployments and live USB use.