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Jon Brown
Jon Brown
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TLDR; I hope you want to grow the userbase and compete with the normal goto products. If not, then please, stop the negative reviews and comments in other forums, and essentially wasting the time of new users and your amazing staff, by making some 'simple and free' changes to your marketing.

https://www.clearos.com/clearfoundation/social/community/clear-losing-ground-to-pfsense

It looks like an age-old question, and I guess the answer is pretty obvious; given that there hasn't been much progress in 8 years, and when evaluating clearOS Home as an actual "Home User" product.

Is clearOS Home realistically always going to be for those with coding knowledge and for clearOS Business users; for use in 'their' Home?


If so, like many others, I will bow out now and not post anymore, freeing up mainly Nicks time; you are lucky to have someone with his ability and drive to nurture those asking for aid.

Please take this from someone who wants to help (if it's wanted, however, I cannot code) to get the home product competing with the usual firewall and home office solutions.
Many competitors are taking advantage of the current homeworking situation and coming out with more specialised products, specifically due to the higher demand generated by the pandemic.
There should also have been some upturn in traffic coinciding with clearPhone's user-base, given their natural curiosity concerning privacy, and with them browsing the OS products and the clever move to include their forum within this one.

Let's be honest. The clearOS Home product has been the cause of many less than favourable reviews and for many years now. Reputation wise, and in my humble opinion, this should be a priority, given the prior paragraph. Despite my research and knowledge of this before moving to clearOS. I still chose clearOS.

You must know that whilst the product is excellent for CLI users; you surely understand the potential of what is in your hands, where there is a serious opportunity to develop a product that will wipe the floor with most, if not all of the others; if you wished it to be, and if you had the coding resource.

Coding resource is quite possibly in a loose-loose situation. If essential, simplified and expected features for the Home / Home-Lab community were implemented, this would bring more of the new homeworking users, the home-lab demographic, ex-users, and would very likely retain this individuals, whilst spreading positivity across third party site's. The key benefits continue with these tinkerer's and coder's bringing more support to the forum and maybe even freeing up some resource. This demographic is widely known to likely help with some of the heavy lifting not only for the actual OS, but bring more Apps and enhancing the feature set. Again, if you wished for this.

The USP's of clearOS are its feature set, with the only competition being Zentyal and Uninvention Server.
The Proxy SSL nature of Gateway Management provided by AdamNetworks means you still have a chance to make changes, independently of the box, if something goes wrong with rulesets and without having to expose any ports. Although this is also probable with the PfSense as it is also supported, however, PfSense users are more likely to not go down the qualified list route.
The base philosophy of the company, given it's focus on privacy.

If this happens to be my penultimate post. Please, seriously consider changing the marketing. Ensure that the additional homeworking, clearPhone user-base and the usual PfSense, OPNSense, NethServer, Zentyal Home and Home-Lab demographic 'know what they are getting and without ambiguity'. You have everything to gain by changing the marketing, and it costs nothing but a small amount of time. This will only lead to positive reviews, lower forum requests and massively reducing the negative reviews from those expecting a "Home User" product, which at the worse case scenario has been and is still being received as fairly disingenuous.

I truly hope this is received as intended and I hope to remain with clearOS and an unexpected turnaround with clearFoundation in making a true "Home User" product.

Thanks, Jon
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Saturday, April 10 2021, 02:50 PM
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  • Accepted Answer

    Sunday, April 11 2021, 09:38 AM - #Permalink
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    Hey Jon,

    Really nice to hear your thoughts of ClearOS. A lot has happened in the last few years and it not helped ClearOS to go to a next level. To be honest it made things only worse.

    I start using ClearOS in 2009 and like you I was very enthusiastic. I really liked ClearOS and I still do. I must admit I'm not that active at the moment for ClearOS. Mainly because of the unknow future of ClearOS.

    I think ClearOS can use every help it can get and also a positive breeze. I'm always open for helping out ClearCenter and ClearOS.
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