[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?

[jaboutboul]

It is not published in the store yet for WSL, but you can use it in WSL using the instructions here: https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux/issues/10997

There is no graphical environment, but you could probably pull that off with some tinkering. Well maybe not some, maybe a lot, but its not impossible. You can build/install anything just like any other distro.

[voidr]

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

[jaboutboul]

It was initially based on deb in the earlier iterations of its life, but ultimately, we decided to use Fedora as a base as a good balance between stability and new feature enablement.

That decision also makes it easier for us to contribute to Fedora upstream and collab with others, for example AWS uses Fedora for the base of Amazon Linux too, so there may be ways we can work together to solve common problems. I'm not making any future/promise statements with that comment. My point is, we are happy to collab upstream, using real open-source, community pathways.

[kmacleod]

I've created and managed five distributions for two companies. I've found RPM to have slightly easier tooling across the whole stack, from developers building individual RPMs/specs up through building and managing 1000s of RPMs across multiple releases. The Fedora build model makes a great reference and source of tools for spinning your own distributions.