Microsoft's Azure Linux

[jaboutboul]

Hey! I’m part of the larger Azure Linux team. Glad to answer any questions. It is a tad late here though so drop em and I’ll get to them in the morning!

[VladStanimir]

Is this available for wsl? Is there there a site that documents what packedges are available? Is this purely a cli distro or does it have a graphical environment?

[voidr]

Why RPM and not DEB or something more modern? Is it for Read Had compatibility?

[Sytten]

Not even at gunpoint would I choose Azure as my cloud provider but great for Linux

[jaboutboul]

Neat. What can we do better?

[osigurdson]

I can't believe it is that bad!

[binsquare]

Nothing new,this is meant for their cloud Linux boxes.

Not meant to replace windows 11 as others are suggesting

[ajcp]

Having watched MSFT slowly chip away at their traditional bread-and-butter OS model with things like OneDrive and Office in the browser, Azure and then WSL, and listening to the Acquired podcast episodes on Microsoft, I wonder why they haven't simply released a Microsoft Linux by now, if only out of pride? Do they feel that by doing so they're broadcasting that they're no longer a computing philosophy leader, and merely a market preference fulfiller (which is itself a backhanded way of saying they meet market demand I guess).

[jaboutboul]

To answer all the comments in this thread at once, and this is my personal opinion, building a distro is easy, releasing a distro and supporting customers that use it is much harder.

[perfmode]

Conceding superiority to Linux would make them a computing philosophy leader.

[poisonborz]

Ask a very simple question: how would this generate profits, which high level manager would be motivated to do this? Sure, 15-20 years ago corporations would've made vanity/critics-industry appeasing projects like this out of pride alone. Those times are over.

[superb_dev]

Is Azure running its hypervisors on Linux these days? I read awhile back that they were switching from Windows

[jaboutboul]

No. It’s still very much Hyper-V running a custom build of what you can call windows underneath.

[pjmlp]

It is still Azure Host OS, officially.

There was a project to add Hyper-V like capabilities to Azure Linux fork, but they went silent after the announcement.

[bandrami]

Wasn't part of one of the big lawsuits 30 years ago that Microsoft could not market a UNIX derivative?

[jmclnx]

Interesting question. I remember M/S sold or spun off Xenix, but I thought that was due to them wanting to focus on DOS and Windows.

Found this and the answer is "no" :) Seems they rid of it due to Bell Labs breakup, see "Transfer of ownership to SCO":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

[zer0zzz]

How is Linux a Unix derivative apart from some guy in Finland reading a sysV syscall manual in 1990?

[steve1977]

I mean Microsoft actually had a quite successful UNIX derivative named Xenix in the 80s (later sold to SCO).

[deafpolygon]

If it’s derived from Red Hat, I don’t understand why not simply work/collaborate with Red Hat on this rather than splitting the codebase and creating new forks?

[jaboutboul]

we do work and collaborate in fedora upstream. the reason for having a separate distro is to serve a different audience. there are several things to balance like life/supportability cycle, hardware enablement vs. legacy work, etc.

[knbknb]

How many Microsoft employees are working on Azure Linux in 2026 (full-time equivalents)? Github Project Page lists ~ 195 contributors today.

Is Azure Linux relying on community contributions, and MS employees do not write code, justt review, plan, coordinate? Or is it the other way around, Microsoft developers do most of the work, and occasionally accept a small PR and interesting feature requests from the community, here and there?

[rolph]

even microsoft knows better than to use windows for infrastructure.

[natas]

qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom AzureLinux-3.0-x86_64.iso -boot d -m 2048

[shevy-java]

Even Microsoft is betting on Linux now. No wonder given Win11 not being popular! :D

[thayne]

Azure has been using Linux from the beginning.

[lynndotpy]

While I agree Windows 11 is abysmal, Azure Linux is nothing new.

[jansan]

The strategy "Embrace, extend and extinguish" by Microsoft even has its own Wikipedia page.

[paulddraper]

> now

This has been true from day 1.

As you saw the repo has been around for quite some time.

[jajuuka]

You wanna take a look at the age of those commits again?

[klipklop]

I wonder where this sits in the “Embrace, extend and extinguish” cycle. I would avoid this distro like the plague for fear of future lock-in.

[Datagenerator]

Where is the downvote button? Remember: it's EEE all the way.

[smitty1e]

Torvalds wept.

[senectus1]

nah, he loves it.

[bchewyme]

damn when did this come out?

[brunoborges]

Technically, Azure Linux was announced long time ago, but it was named CBL-D / CBL-Mariner.

The "Azure Linux" brand was released in 2023: https://devclass.com/2023/05/25/azure-linux-released-at-buil...

But the CBL-Mariner distribution (based on Debian) has existed since long before, and I believe it was formally announced sometime in 2021: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-released-cbl-mar...

[RajT88]

Pandemic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Linux

[unixhero]

This is the most absurd news I have read in a while. I for one welcome our new open source overlords.

[jmspring]

How is this different from Amazon Linux - the base for EC2/etc?