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Microsoft's Azure Linux (github.com/microsoft)
54 points by AbuAssar 4 hours ago | past | 77 comments
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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!

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

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

Neat. What can we do better?

There's quite a bit you could do better.

As for the US, having the laws on the books appropriately applied, resulting in a breaking up of the company would make me much more likely to opt for Azure.

For the remaining 96% of the world population that isn't the US, there's not much you can do, as the ICC case shows you to be an adversary. You'd have to show through big actions that you no longer are one.

I'm sure someone wants to reply "why so aggressive, they're doing their best, they don't have anything to do with the above". Almost certainly someone who wouldn't write this if I were replying to a Flock, ClearView, Paragon [0] or Palantir employee on here, despite Microsoft realistically being a much bigger societal threat - and top enabler of the former companies - in every way imaginable.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/02/trump-immigr...


he will take your concerns directly to satya microsoft himself

You have a core team member of the Azure Linux group invite you to ask/tell them what you want to see in what they are working on and this is what you choose to say? Smh

They referred to Microsoft’s known practice of embrace, extend, extinguish a “conspiracy theory” in a sibling thread, so they’ve essentially lost credibility. I don’t think genuine feedback is going anywhere useful.

“We” feels a little insincere when you’re speaking on behalf of such a large corporation. I’m sure the comment had more to do with weaknesses of Azure as a whole rather than your team’s piece.

In the last few months, this place is turning into Slashdot 2.0. So you're going to encounter people still seething about the 1990s.

seriously, there is a huge issue with reputation and trust.

after what has happened with consumer products, how can anybody be sure its not going to happen on the server side?


Not be Microsoft, mostly.

you know feedback is being requested, you could put a little more quality into it, pretend they dont know what has ever been said about them before.

pretend your a manager, and you have to approach an employee about thier hygiene.


I can't believe it is that bad!

My company picked Azure. So I work with it every day and it is extremely painful to deploy anything that’s not a dotnet application on azure dev ops. One time the app service deployment pipeline just silently failed while trying to build our app. We only found out our new code didn’t deploy when someone asked about the new features expected to go out.

The management portal is super slow, every time you click a button it’s basically a roll of the dice whether the action will work or not.

And as with most things Microsoft these days there are reams of docs detailing every single feature, and none of it fucking works as described.

I will say, if you just want to deploy a quick app from VSCode from your local machine or whatever, it works great. But if you need anything off the golden path it quickly becomes frustrating.


I have worked with AWS, Google and Azure. Google Cloud has the worst UI of them, it slow, broken and just horrible. UI in AWS may be faster than Azure, but overal layout and organization feels a lot better in Azure. I would strongly recommend clearly separating builds from deployments, if you don't want bad surprises. In the age of containers there should really be no difference in how, where or what you deploy.

Don't forget the part where blades will often be different from what's described in the docs, because Microsoft loves changing/renaming shit for no reason.

Ditch the VScode virus before it hurts. LLM based action infiltration will rise in 2026 but rest assured, that doesn't work in NeoVIM/VIM.

For sure, I don’t use VSCode and that’s part of what makes Azure so hard to use. All their stuff is built to support VSCode first.

I like working with the cli instead of the portal. But even the cli is clunky.

I do have to give them credit. The cli is pretty good. And Azure Storage Explorer is probably the best Microsoft app I’ve ever used. So props to the team who made that.

Would love to hear more about your frustration and how it can be fixed. Message me at my nick @microsoft.com please.

It isn't.

I have done projects across Azure, AWS and GCP, and without a doubt would always pick Azure.

AWS is a master in complexity, one almost requires a PhD in cloud infrastructure to make sense of how everything works.

GCP is the usual "talk to the bots" when something happens, unless it gets escalated.

Azure can be as complicated as AWS, or one can enjoy the nice GUI tooling similar in spirit to VS or InteliJ like confort.

Even for timesharing like workflows with a cloud shell and Web IDE, it appears AWS and GCP take pride on being a clunky bad experience.


Just doesn’t match my experience at all. AWS isnsuper complex but stuff works. GCP has clearly the nicest interface but not every feature that AWS has. Azure is complex, slow, hard to use and incredibly opaque. No way I’ll use it again out of my own free will.

We've been through the big three, starting with AWS, then GCP and now Azure. I long for the days of AWS and GCP.

Well then we have to agree to disagree, I will keep Azure on top of my list, AWS second and GCP last.

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

Not meant to replace windows 11 as others are suggesting


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).

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.

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

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

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

I don't think SCO's claim ever got adjudicated but it was enough to let them shake down multiple companies

Ahh yeah I remember that one now.

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

Right, that was mentioned in the case IIRC; they didn't want that to happen again

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

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


> Another thing you may have noticed is that the taskmgr or even regedit does not look the same as you would see on Windows 11. This is because as I mentioned, Cloud Host is built on OneCore and it is headless (or console based), hence, it doesn’t contain any of the GUI pieces of Windows. We have a special taskmgr and regedit version that doesn’t link with all the modern GUI functionality available in Windows 11, which gives them the “old style” look.

I haven't used Windows in a long time, so it looked normal to me. I just went and watched a video on Windows 11, goodness me.


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.


even microsoft knows better than to use windows for infrastructure.

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

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

Azure has been using Linux from the beginning.

Genuine question: Is Azure a giant Kubernetes cluster?

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

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

Conspiracy theory

It might be when used now, but it was used by Microsoft internally at the time.

First part of that Wikipedia page:

> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors.


Now it is. In the late 90s/early 00s it wasn’t. MS is quite different today from what it was back then.

The MS of today is actively reaping the benefits of the EEE & openly shady business years.

Their behavioural changes can be framed as an intentional reformation, but also as exhausting high-value targets, losing monopolies, and settling into profitable equilibrium out of necessity.

Modern competitors to MS are effectively immune to MS-EEE, in some cases by being way better at every aspect of it (MS IE is now delivered by Google based on forked Apple tech, and Office uses React, for quick examples…). MS pivoted to Azure-entanglements for their entrenched customers, which remains highly profitable, but have also had a marked decrease in engineering clout in certain key areas and still have a fragmented client/GUI ecosystem.

I’d contend they haven’t changed, they’re just cornered in ways they never were before so we see different behaviour. If MS controlled iOS or Facebook or WebKit or Search we’d see more classic plays reminding us who owns what.


You shouldn’t be posting replies like this on a public forum if you’re actually a MS employee.

Are you speaking on behalf of Microsoft?

Are you really claiming the US-DoJ are conspiracy theorists?

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

> now

This has been true from day 1.

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


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?

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.

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

damn when did this come out?

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...


i know 2021 feels like a lifetime ago, but AWS had linux (Amazon Linux?) a decade before that (maybe even 18 years ago?) When i think "azure" i think AD, winserver DCE, and so on. Obviously if they want complete vendor lock in they have to have first party linux, too, rather than people doing hypervisors on VMs on hypervisors.

>> When i think "azure" i think AD, winserver DCE, and so on

That is interesting, when I think Azure, I just think "AWS" but in different regions and a clunky / overthought UI.


> based on Debian

Are you sure about that? Everything I can find now and from when it was first covered suggests that it's an RPM based "distro" (let's not argue about whether it's technically a distro).

The TomsHardware article you linked to in turns links to ZDNet which in turn links to an InfoWorld article (isn't modern reposted rehashed "news" slop just fucking delightful) about the "release" of CBL-Mariner notes that it was created as a replacement to the then-recently-deprecated RedHat CoreOS, and references that (at the time) MS had a deal with a company that was supporting a CoreOS fork.

Given those two factors, it isn't impossible but it seems hard to believe that they would use a Debian base but then Frankenstein RPM package manage into it.




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

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

Does amazon make an OS like Windows? Did Amazon wage a multi year long war against Linux and the open source philosophy in its history?

Linux for their respective cloud resources. Neither is intended to really be a public distro.

It's super weird people are bitter about things that happened almost two decades ago. Much less there was no war. I think Ballmer said some mean words about Linux and Microsoft sued Lindows for infringement and won. After the rename to Linspire Microsoft actually worked with them on compatibility. The whole Windows v Linux "war" is completely contrived by some fans of Linux as some holy war.

That completely glosses over the actual behaviour of Microsoft, and ignoring the kinds of career, business, project, and reputational damage those tactics did.

MS’s attacks on open source, open formats, and free software impacted and still impact democracies, developing nations, general computing capabilities, and create vast market inefficiencies. Looking at it as pure tech misses the forest for the trees. The corruption of the Office OpenXml process alone is a daily pox on the developing world. The tax impact of those entanglements is recurrent, and frequently hurts education and healthcare.

Also: if someone got burnt by some industry jerks and have had to deal with the fallout for decades, “it was 20 years ago” completely misstates the problem. Some BS was started 20 years ago, sure, but with daily crap-bowls that needed to be eaten every day in between. Entire careers have fallen into those cracks, armies of IT staff forced into suboptimal and broken workflows to satisfy decisions based on establishing and abusing monopolies.

Breaking a spine, even years and years ago, impacts the every day. Bitterness can be well deserved with an understanding of what was lost.


Didn't Microsoft throw SCO some bones to help sue linux vendors?

Heres a hasty link to an article about it https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/microsoft_offered_to_u...


> Much less there was no war.

Did people pick up literal guns and fight each other with literal bullets over Linux/Microsoft?

No of course not. Even most American nerds aren't deranged.

Did Microsoft do everything it could to try and kill Linux, and the concept of OSS in general? You bet your fucking ass they did.

> Microsoft sued Lindows for infringement and won. After the rename to Linspire Microsoft actually worked with them on compatibility.

Holy revisionist history batman.

This isn't exactly fucking hard to find

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com....

> As early as 2002, a court rejected Microsoft's claims, stating that Microsoft had used the term "windows" to describe graphical user interfaces before the product, Windows, was ever released, and the windowing technique had already been implemented by Xerox and Apple many years before.[4] Microsoft kept seeking retrial, but in February 2004, a judge rejected two of Microsoft's central claims.[5] The judge denied Microsoft's request for a preliminary injunction and raised "serious questions" about Microsoft's trademark. Microsoft feared a court may define "Windows" as generic and result in the loss of its status as a trademark.

> In July 2004, Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows.[6] As part of this licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated US$20,000,000 (equivalent to $33,294,574 in 2024), and Lindows transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed their name to Linspire.

> completely contrived by some fans of Linux

I mean there are absolutely some fanboy fantasies of grandeur here but I don't think it's the "fans of Linux" who are delusional mate.


No.

Amazon wasn’t even a twinkle in its father’s eye.


Both are Fedora/Red Hat based.



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