You get a sense of it now. Azure Linux 3.0 is the base for the WSL system distro, there all the WSLg (GUI) and now the wslc plumbing happens. It's ephemeral, but you can drop in and look around with wsl --system --user root. An official WSL image of Azure Linux 4.0 is coming in a few weeks that you'll be able to install with wsl.exe --install Azure...(I'm not sure the exact name).
Yeah, a general purpose distro would come with a desktop environment and you'd be able to run it on your PC as your main OS.
Calling this general purpose is so misleading.
Of course describing reality in titles would have the inconvenience of causing fewer clicks to these articles.
call me old fashioned isn't a general purpose OS one that runs on any hardware and set up? and is certified with hardware vendors for full backing and support?
all this says is: "MS now provides a unified Linux from WSL to the MS cloud. just like what you got w/ SUSE RH canonical up to now. but without any support outside the MS stack.", right?
AFAIK it isn’t a declared term my left shoe is my first general purpose operating system, if i toss an esp32 in there i can probably call it linux too.
How desperate is Microsoft right now? Their model website was trying hard to be Anthropic, now they claim they have a linux distro? Which is just a tuned version?
They have had a linux distro for a while, this one is at least 6 years old. They used it for container workloads, including those visible to client like AKS.
"Microsoft’s in-house Linux, the distribution that grew out of CBL-Mariner, just hit public preview as a general-purpose cloud OS you can run on any Azure VM. Here is why that is a real step in Microsoft’s Linux journey, not just a version bump."
It's from Microsoft. Many companies love to be very tightly tied to Microsoft, for some reasons. I never really understood the actual underlying reasons. Perhaps Windows 95 was that good and it's brand loyalty since.
Because someone has to be accountable, right? In business practices, having no clear party responsible for an area you don't fully understand is a difficult problem. Ultimately, I think it's a matter of accountability. Regardless of how lightweight and good Linux is, Windows is still a bit more convenient on the GUI side.
This is a nonevent, unless perhaps some genuine "general purpose" tools come out of this. MS will never contribute to things such as Wine and Proton and kill its golden goose.
I don't think Microsoft would intentionally compete with Windows, but it does seem as though they are preparing for a world where Windows is no longer their golden goose, or at least hedging their bets. Given that Windows has already decisively lost the battle for servers, this seems prudent.
Microsoft could give Windows away for free and be fine. Of course it’s still a lot of money, so they’re not going to leave a multibillion dollar business on the table. But strategically, preserving its revenue is not their priority.
How many percent of their revenue funel are dependent directly or indirectly on windows beeing the peoples workstation funneling them towards their subpar ptoducts?
You say that, but Microsoft has contributed to Wine!
Both in terms of code and help, on occasion. Microsoft gave Mono to Wine, and while Wine has a ban on accepting code from people who have seen the source of Microsoft Windows, they have, if I recall correctly, accepted documentation on Windows Internals from Microsoft themselves.
They could of also pulled an Oracle , claimed the APIs are copyrighted and sued.
WINE, even if right couldn't afford to fight.
I can even imagine official Linux support for the Surface tablets.
Infact, Microsoft makes very little off its consumer OS. They could even give up the market entirely and bless a distro with solid WINE support for legacy applications.
> They could of also pulled an Oracle , claimed the APIs are copyrighted and sued.
They did, well - not the suing part, but everything else in your sentence; including helping Oracle "pull an Oracle". In 2013, Microsoft filed an Amicus brief in support of Oracle's[1] position, appealing against a judges ruling that APIs cannot be copyrighted. At the time, Microsoft were also trying to get an Android-compatible runtime on Windows off the ground, which was incredibly awkward. They came to their right mind by the time 2019 rolled by and the case had been appealed to the Supreme Court. At this occasion, Microsoft switched teams and filed an amicus in support of Google. I don't know if Microsoft's 2016 release of WSL had anything to do with it.
>MS will never contribute to things such as Wine and Proton and kill its golden goose.
I think Microsoft is contributing to Linux kernel. Their golden gooses are Azure and Office which have nothing to do with Wine and Proton.
It wouldn't be too weird if they will release a win32 compatibility layer for Linux in the future as they might not want to maintain a full operating system.
For instance Bing and LinkedIn combined bring in more than Windows at this point. And XBox is basically on par.
Their money makers don't rely on Windows either, so the OS isn't even a useable moat, which is why they can afford to enshittify the consumer version to death.
Sundar Pichai does not work in Microsoft, though. A bit weird to anchor the MS timeline on his position. When he became the CEO, actually? I don’t remember the year even approximately
Ah, okay, my bad. Got too focused on the name. Googled the dates, Satya became CEO in 2014 and Sundar became CEO in 2015, so it’s actually not that different, especially when we look at the events more than a decade later.
Little harder to pull that off when the key components are all GPL licensed, but also all of Microsoft's bits and pieces for their distro seem to be MIT Licensed. Honestly, it certainly feels more like Google lives by Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (email, browsers, video streaming, etc).
You cited three of the most prominent counterexamples to the common meme about Google killing their products as evidence of them extinguishing things. I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, but I don't think you've demonstrated what you think you have.
The “extinguish” part refers to your competition, not to your own product.
You embrace a popular open standard, add new features to your software that build upon the standard (but are proprietary), then watch as your competitors die off because customers become locked into your proprietary features.
Similar to how Apple hijacked SMS to add iMessage and introduced all kinds of features and the blue/green bubble styling.
For the longest time, they refused to support RCS, trying to keep people on iPhone by making texting between iOS and Android suck.
Of course, a lot of people switched to third party messaging apps because of how much Apple was intentionally ruining texting, so now Apple has had to adopt RCS.
So the “extinguish” part can be hard to pull off given sufficiently strong competition.
Not really. They've always advertised it for, well, Azure, and the actual announcement[0] makes it clear that it's simply a distro for Azure workloads. Considering they state it's "built exclusively for cloud and server workloads, it is not intended to support desktop usage or GUI applications," Microsoft isn't playing that game here.
As a Fedora hater, I'm also happy it's RPM based; IMO, .debs are just flat out worse than .rpm as a format and the tooling on top matches that. I do wonder, though:
> Azure Linux 4.0 is derived from Fedora, right now a Fedora 43 snapshot, rather than assembled package by package the way 1.0 through 3.0 were.
Then what's the point? They could just ship Fedora. There are minor differences, but all things that sound easy to get upstreamed with minimal effort.
Time difference. A VP at Microsoft has someone they can yell at to make an ship a change. Having to ask upstream politely and then wait for their release schedule was proving to be an issue.
Same as with any distribution it gives you flexibility over update cadence, validate your software doesn't break with updates, and push out your own hotfixes without being tied to the release process upstream.
No it's not. It's for tuned for Azure. Nobody is running this outside of their compute environment.
I was curious to see what it would be like to run this under WLS. I'm guessing we'll get our chance at some point.
You get a sense of it now. Azure Linux 3.0 is the base for the WSL system distro, there all the WSLg (GUI) and now the wslc plumbing happens. It's ephemeral, but you can drop in and look around with wsl --system --user root. An official WSL image of Azure Linux 4.0 is coming in a few weeks that you'll be able to install with wsl.exe --install Azure...(I'm not sure the exact name).
You may be right, its possible however that people running on Azure may use it locally for testing.
Yeah, a general purpose distro would come with a desktop environment and you'd be able to run it on your PC as your main OS. Calling this general purpose is so misleading.
Of course describing reality in titles would have the inconvenience of causing fewer clicks to these articles.
The title on HN could be updated though.
I don’t know really. Amazon AL2023 can be used outside aws for example, and people might want the same distro on-prem as the cloud.
It’s not the average joe/jane though.
call me old fashioned isn't a general purpose OS one that runs on any hardware and set up? and is certified with hardware vendors for full backing and support?
all this says is: "MS now provides a unified Linux from WSL to the MS cloud. just like what you got w/ SUSE RH canonical up to now. but without any support outside the MS stack.", right?
or am I missing something?
Don't worry you aren't. Luckily no one will use this distro day to day
ISV certification is coming.
On-prem hardware support would be interesting, wouldn't it?
I'd say old fashioned Linux would come without any certification or support.
AFAIK it isn’t a declared term my left shoe is my first general purpose operating system, if i toss an esp32 in there i can probably call it linux too.
I fell like this could be a move to purposefully mislead and confuse "Normies" of what to expect from "general purpose Linux" means.
Moving from tdnf to dnf5 is interesting. Most internal platforms get more bespoke over time, not less.
How desperate is Microsoft right now? Their model website was trying hard to be Anthropic, now they claim they have a linux distro? Which is just a tuned version?
What's next?
> now they claim they have a linux distro?
They have had a linux distro for a while, this one is at least 6 years old. They used it for container workloads, including those visible to client like AKS.
It seems with 4 they are using Fedora underneath.
Previously (61 points, 17 days ago, 49 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187736
Microsoft's Azure Linux (66 points, 4 months ago, 109 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805841
"Microsoft’s in-house Linux, the distribution that grew out of CBL-Mariner, just hit public preview as a general-purpose cloud OS you can run on any Azure VM. Here is why that is a real step in Microsoft’s Linux journey, not just a version bump."
Christ, they even lead with AI slop.
Do people not realize that this just instantly torpedoes credibility and respect? I'm dumbfounded.
What advantages does Azure Linux have compared to Ubuntu?
It's from Microsoft. Many companies love to be very tightly tied to Microsoft, for some reasons. I never really understood the actual underlying reasons. Perhaps Windows 95 was that good and it's brand loyalty since.
Because someone has to be accountable, right? In business practices, having no clear party responsible for an area you don't fully understand is a difficult problem. Ultimately, I think it's a matter of accountability. Regardless of how lightweight and good Linux is, Windows is still a bit more convenient on the GUI side.
Microsoft was a *nix supporter from the very beginning, with Microsoft Xenix.
This is a nonevent, unless perhaps some genuine "general purpose" tools come out of this. MS will never contribute to things such as Wine and Proton and kill its golden goose.
I don't think Microsoft would intentionally compete with Windows, but it does seem as though they are preparing for a world where Windows is no longer their golden goose, or at least hedging their bets. Given that Windows has already decisively lost the battle for servers, this seems prudent.
It’s already no longer their golden goose. It’s about 6% of total revenue (see http://bullfincher.io/companies/microsoft-corporation/revenu...).
Microsoft could give Windows away for free and be fine. Of course it’s still a lot of money, so they’re not going to leave a multibillion dollar business on the table. But strategically, preserving its revenue is not their priority.
How many percent of their revenue funel are dependent directly or indirectly on windows beeing the peoples workstation funneling them towards their subpar ptoducts?
Probably some amount. I agree Windows is strategic, but do definitely could see them giving it away and/or fully open sourcing it.
Technically they gave mono to the wine project
You say that, but Microsoft has contributed to Wine!
Both in terms of code and help, on occasion. Microsoft gave Mono to Wine, and while Wine has a ban on accepting code from people who have seen the source of Microsoft Windows, they have, if I recall correctly, accepted documentation on Windows Internals from Microsoft themselves.
Which is rather kind.
They could of also pulled an Oracle , claimed the APIs are copyrighted and sued.
WINE, even if right couldn't afford to fight.
I can even imagine official Linux support for the Surface tablets.
Infact, Microsoft makes very little off its consumer OS. They could even give up the market entirely and bless a distro with solid WINE support for legacy applications.
> They could of also pulled an Oracle , claimed the APIs are copyrighted and sued.
They did, well - not the suing part, but everything else in your sentence; including helping Oracle "pull an Oracle". In 2013, Microsoft filed an Amicus brief in support of Oracle's[1] position, appealing against a judges ruling that APIs cannot be copyrighted. At the time, Microsoft were also trying to get an Android-compatible runtime on Windows off the ground, which was incredibly awkward. They came to their right mind by the time 2019 rolled by and the case had been appealed to the Supreme Court. At this occasion, Microsoft switched teams and filed an amicus in support of Google. I don't know if Microsoft's 2016 release of WSL had anything to do with it.
1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/microsoft-forese...
>MS will never contribute to things such as Wine and Proton and kill its golden goose.
I think Microsoft is contributing to Linux kernel. Their golden gooses are Azure and Office which have nothing to do with Wine and Proton.
It wouldn't be too weird if they will release a win32 compatibility layer for Linux in the future as they might not want to maintain a full operating system.
DeathArrow also touches on this, but to complete:
Windows stopped being the Golden Goose a long time ago, probably from the point Satya Nadella became CEO.
A visual aid from a quick search: https://visuwire.com/microsoft/
For instance Bing and LinkedIn combined bring in more than Windows at this point. And XBox is basically on par.
Their money makers don't rely on Windows either, so the OS isn't even a useable moat, which is why they can afford to enshittify the consumer version to death.
[Edit: fixed the CEO name]
Sundar Pichai does not work in Microsoft, though. A bit weird to anchor the MS timeline on his position. When he became the CEO, actually? I don’t remember the year even approximately
Sorry it was a brain fart. I meant Satya Nadella.
Ah, okay, my bad. Got too focused on the name. Googled the dates, Satya became CEO in 2014 and Sundar became CEO in 2015, so it’s actually not that different, especially when we look at the events more than a decade later.
Pretty sure he meant Satya Nadella but picked the wrong name...
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish anyone? Although, as a Fedora user I'm happy it's RPM based.
Little harder to pull that off when the key components are all GPL licensed, but also all of Microsoft's bits and pieces for their distro seem to be MIT Licensed. Honestly, it certainly feels more like Google lives by Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (email, browsers, video streaming, etc).
That's why they're pushing hardware attestation so aggressively
Agreed on the Google front here.
You cited three of the most prominent counterexamples to the common meme about Google killing their products as evidence of them extinguishing things. I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, but I don't think you've demonstrated what you think you have.
The “extinguish” part refers to your competition, not to your own product.
You embrace a popular open standard, add new features to your software that build upon the standard (but are proprietary), then watch as your competitors die off because customers become locked into your proprietary features.
Similar to how Apple hijacked SMS to add iMessage and introduced all kinds of features and the blue/green bubble styling.
For the longest time, they refused to support RCS, trying to keep people on iPhone by making texting between iOS and Android suck.
Of course, a lot of people switched to third party messaging apps because of how much Apple was intentionally ruining texting, so now Apple has had to adopt RCS.
So the “extinguish” part can be hard to pull off given sufficiently strong competition.
Not really. They've always advertised it for, well, Azure, and the actual announcement[0] makes it clear that it's simply a distro for Azure workloads. Considering they state it's "built exclusively for cloud and server workloads, it is not intended to support desktop usage or GUI applications," Microsoft isn't playing that game here.
[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/linuxandopensourceb...
As a Fedora hater, I'm also happy it's RPM based; IMO, .debs are just flat out worse than .rpm as a format and the tooling on top matches that. I do wonder, though:
> Azure Linux 4.0 is derived from Fedora, right now a Fedora 43 snapshot, rather than assembled package by package the way 1.0 through 3.0 were.
Then what's the point? They could just ship Fedora. There are minor differences, but all things that sound easy to get upstreamed with minimal effort.
Time difference. A VP at Microsoft has someone they can yell at to make an ship a change. Having to ask upstream politely and then wait for their release schedule was proving to be an issue.
Same as with any distribution it gives you flexibility over update cadence, validate your software doesn't break with updates, and push out your own hotfixes without being tied to the release process upstream.
Default configurations as well, since it states FIPS compliance it has to change defaults <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RemoveFipsModeSetup#W...>
Extinguish Windows morelike...
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187736
[laughs in Torvalds.]
Tldr a MSFT maintained fedora fork tuned for Azure hardware.