Clear Linux Migration to CentOS

Our Neighbors CentOS
1

I was a user of CentOS / Fedora many years ago. I migrated to Clear Linux on the Advice of AMD, back in 2021. As advertised it was very fast, was solid with respect to performance of server functions. I run samba in a PDC role and as a network router. Still works, but support came to an abrupt end in July of this year. The current version of the important server services
I am using are:

Distribution:      Clear Linux 
OS Installed 
version: 43760
Version 
URL:       https://cdn.download.clearlinux.org/updateContent 
URL:       https://cdn.download.clearlinux.org/updatekernel: 
Linux netserver03 6.15.5-1588.native #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jul 7 07:33:34 PDT 2025 x86_64 GNU/Linux
samba ver: Version 4.22.2
kerberos Version:     Kerberos 5 release 1.21.3
Vendor:      Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPrefix:      
/usrExec_prefix: 
/usr

I read that CentOS boots just about as fast as Clear Linux is this true.
I remeber the support being better from years ago, Clear Linux support was there but not
not great.
If you can provide comments I would appreciate it.

2

CentOS boots pretty fast.

Support is a bit lacking in community forums.

I use the Matrix channels and get good replies and conversations.

Overall a great system, and most Fedora docs apply so I often search for Fedora support rather than CentOS support.

3

I haven’t tried CentOS since it became CentOS Stream and have never used Clear Linux. So I can’t really comment on the boot times of them.

You say that it is a Samba domain controller, from which I gather that it needs to be constantly up for Samba clients. In this scenario, is boot time really your biggest concern? I mean, even if it took like 2min to boot up (just a random number, I don’t expect it to take that long), and you had to reboot it every two weeks or so for some (security) update, would it really matter if another distro could bring that number down to, say, 1min?

For a server, I think stability and maturity are more important factors than boot time, you hopefully don’t (re)boot them that often anyway.

4

There were times when I Clear Linux bricked my Server, but I had developed a process where I guarded against that, plus it only did that a small handful of times, I had a pair of rescue flash drives, that had the previous version, whereby I could get my main server to go back to the previous version. I found the server functions which I relied on were very stable. The graphic terminal X-Windows Wayland broke big time, because they made a decision to adopt the Wayland protocol. That was painful but not impossible, finally they got RDP to work, sharing a running a GUI session on the main server. There were other wonky things that happened along the way, but generally the issues got ironed out. It booted fast; it had the latest version of the Linux kernel running. That said, business conditions with Intel made it such that they called it quits in the middle of July. The distribution eliminated unnecessary items to decrease boot time, be removing unnecessary components. This distribution turned out to be very stable and fast as a result.