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rswail 13 hours ago [-]
OK, so this is important not because it comes from Microsoft.
1. It's general purpose in that it is designed to be used to deliver any application software, whether containerized, on a VM or on (specific) bare hardware.
2. It has an SBOM that allows all elements of the distribution when run as a container/VM/bare to have an auditable chain back to the Fedora distribution, which then has a chain back to the source. So that allows companies to comply with the requirements of security audits much better than the "run our automated tool in your kernel to keep you up to date".
3. It's effectively a read-only OS, especially as containers, with that same auditable supply chain.
So no, it won't run on general hardware with random selections of ethernet and wifi and sound and display variations, but it will run any general application in numerous environments with an auditable supply chain.
embedding-shape 10 hours ago [-]
> 1. It's general purpose in that it is designed to be used to deliver any application software
FWIW, it's only the HN title and this article that calls this new distribution "general-purpose". Microsoft themselves say that this the distribution is "Purpose-Built for Azure" (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/linuxandopensourceb...), I'm not sure how the author got it wrong.
panny 9 hours ago [-]
>OK, so this is important not because it comes from Microsoft.
No, it IS important because it comes from Microsoft.
>If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won. - Linus Torvalds
Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine this would happen. Microsoft spent a decade trying to kill Linux via SCO lawfare. Linux has won. Microsoft is completely and utterly defeated.
endemic 8 hours ago [-]
> Microsoft is completely and utterly defeated.
All the way to the bank, apparently.
codycharris 22 hours ago [-]
No it's not. It's for tuned for Azure. Nobody is running this outside of their compute environment.
jraph 20 hours ago [-]
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.
rswail 13 hours ago [-]
It's general purpose in that it can run any Linux application in numerous different ways, containerized, as a VM, or on specific bare hardware.
You and Microsoft are using the word "general purpose" to mean different things.
This is not generally compatible with different hardware.
Nor does it include things that could be considered applications, like desktop environments etc. It's not designed to be run by an end user on a desktop.
embedding-shape 11 hours ago [-]
Someone says:
> Here is a general purpose Linux distribution, give it a try!
Where does your mind go? That this is a server-only distribution meant for a specific provider? Or that it's something like Debian, that could be run on servers and desktops alike without much tinkering, or meant for any provider?
FWIW, Microsoft themselves don't seem to call this a "general purpose Linux distribution", I could probably guess why, what Microsoft themselves say is "Purpose-Built for Azure" which sounds much more accurate. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/linuxandopensourceb...
I think the author might have confused (unintentionally or intentionally, who knows?) "general purpose" with "Purpose-Built for Azure", since Microsoft's own announcements get this right, while submission article is littered with this mistake.
tossandthrow 11 hours ago [-]
Ubuntu server distributions are definitely general purpose.
embedding-shape 11 hours ago [-]
So if I understand what you're saying, if someone asks you "Hey, could you recommend me a general purpose Linux distribution?", you'd recommend them Ubuntu Server rather than just straight up Ubuntu?
I'd agree both could be used in a general-purpose way, but I'd definitively call one of them more general-purpose than the other.
tossandthrow 9 hours ago [-]
If they need a general purpose distro for a server, absolutely.
That would likely be a better recommendation than android.
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
But that wasn't the question, what they ask is specifically "Hey, could you recommend me a general purpose Linux distribution?", would you still first recommend Ubuntu Server?
tossandthrow 9 hours ago [-]
Sure, why not?
PeterStuer 7 hours ago [-]
95% of my VM's run Ubuntu Server LTS, so yes, that is what I would recommend if I was a recommending person.
thesuperbigfrog 11 hours ago [-]
Most Linux server distributions would be expected to be headless.
"General purpose" Linux distributions (not "server") typically would include a GUI desktop.
joxdosba 10 hours ago [-]
A GUI Linux distribution feels vastly more niche than a headless one.
thesuperbigfrog 8 hours ago [-]
Really?
What are some major Linux distributions that are only headless?
What is the market share of those Linux distributions compared to Linux distributions that have a GUI desktop?
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
If we're counting the millions of servers that run the Internet, probably a lot more of them than GUI desktop Linux installs.
stuaxo 17 hours ago [-]
When he said "general purpose" I totally imagined a desktop environment.
gunalx 19 hours ago [-]
According to [1] the guidelines explicitly say to keep editorializing to a specified minimum, unless it is spam. Dont know it this title would allow editorialising
They say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize".
I think it's misleading and linkbait. The mods would decide what to use instead, this could be "Azure Linux 4.0, Microsoft's Linux distribution for its cloud" or something like this.
graemep 17 hours ago [-]
Especially given the article says this:
> It is minimal on purpose. Azure Linux ships only what cloud and server workloads need. There is no desktop, no GUI, no general-purpose sprawl.
hmry 17 hours ago [-]
Yep sure does. Love an article that contradicts its own title. Bonus points for that sentence sounding extremely AI-generated.
b33j0r 19 hours ago [-]
You point to a better timeline. Sometimes—when desperately alone—I imagine.
If only the guy who was destined to close a disk operating system deal with IBM hadn’t been goofing around with his plane that fateful day.
We would all be using lisp machines, running smalltalk on microkernels that put the HURD to shame. Just imagine: instead of backslashes and drive letters, we’d have parens. Endless, syntactically-valid parens.
Or CP/M, probably that. But can it run doom?
hathawsh 19 hours ago [-]
Sorry to break it to you, but on that timeline, the good things got poisoned. IBM enhanced Lisp with Enterprise Ready features like Spreadsheet Macro Builder, Microsoft took over development of Smalltalk and morphed it into BASIC 2.0, and the HURD community lost a bizarre copyright lawsuit. Fortunately for those folks, an intrepid hacker in the 90s saw some of the interesting ideas in MS-DOS and rebuilt it as LS-DOS. Today, most of their servers and mobile phones run LS-DOS or similar.
__patchbit__ 19 hours ago [-]
LSD-OS would be an AI core unsupported by runtime and operating system that cascades streams of consciousness in a portable cartridge smartphone form factor until mounted on an embodiment to become unified and coherent.
b33j0r 18 hours ago [-]
Ah. A common (and understandable) misconception. LSD-OS doesn’t enhance anything in the UX, it just removes the filters that prevent you from seeing reality, man.
Some confuse this with LDS-OS, which makes the user weirdly and unquestionably `nice` by only accepting inputs from protected mode.
qmr 19 hours ago [-]
That's not at all how it went down.
Please don't spread lies about Gary.
b33j0r 16 hours ago [-]
For posterity, parent is correct. The “flying his plane” story is a memeified summary. I did not actually mean that we would have lisp machines otherwise, which was the tell that I was kidding.
For others who did not get the joke, Kindall was kind of a big deal:
> using lisp machines, running smalltalk on microkernels that put the HURD to shame
That future is not different from this future. That road leads down to Javascript and React anyways. (Perhaps with a slightly different syntax.)
rigonkulous 16 hours ago [-]
sigh .. and SGI would've been the ones to make the killer laptop which morphed into a slick metal pocket dependency for billions ...
psychoslave 19 hours ago [-]
Glad that at least we avoided that much more parentheses.
Where is our PL any kind of bracket and other rococo ornamental symbol is at most totally optional?
VincePlatt 21 hours ago [-]
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.
haydenbarnes 21 hours ago [-]
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).
voidfunc 11 hours ago [-]
I know internal folks running AzLinux 3.0 under WSL and it's fine. Not a lot of reasons to do it vs just use Fedora. I'd expect similar for AzLinux 4.0. It's not tuned for day-to-day WSL centric developer use tho.
tomkarho 17 hours ago [-]
I would imagine MS employees might (or be made to) either directly or through wsl.
osigurdson 21 hours ago [-]
You may be right, its possible however that people running on Azure may use it locally for testing.
znpy 20 hours ago [-]
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.
froh 22 hours ago [-]
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?
PacificSpecific 21 hours ago [-]
Don't worry you aren't. Luckily no one will use this distro day to day
steve1977 20 hours ago [-]
I'd say old fashioned Linux would come without any certification or support.
froh 18 hours ago [-]
I didn't mean DIY / Linux from scratch.
and I meant where I come from a general purpose OS is for any purpose, not just to run it on a very specific stack.
what if MS strategizes on their hyper-v as hypervisor, with windows as control Panel and all payload on their Azure Linux? popcorn time?
steve1977 17 hours ago [-]
What I meant was "pure" non-commercial Linux distros like Debian or Arch.
froh 17 hours ago [-]
snicker in slackware. get it, thanks for clarifying.
haydenbarnes 21 hours ago [-]
ISV certification is coming.
On-prem hardware support would be interesting, wouldn't it?
froh 18 hours ago [-]
without certification of other clouds and any hardware this is not general purpose.
their plan might however be a Micro-Windows, which only boots the hyper-v, which then runs that Linux. that move would leverage the Microsoft Windows hardware certification.
starkgoose 20 hours ago [-]
I fell like this could be a move to purposefully mislead and confuse "Normies" of what to expect from "general purpose Linux" means.
hsbauauvhabzb 20 hours ago [-]
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.
Scroll_Swe 11 hours ago [-]
Computing changed fast. I'm lucky I bought my new gaming PC last year. Hopefully not my last but the overlords want us to rent forever.
bananaquant 16 hours ago [-]
It is bad enough that Microsoft just piggybacks on all the work that Red Hat is doing.
Now they are snapshotting the bleeding-edge distribution and call it general purpose, which carries a strong implication that it is ready for all kinds of production workloads.
It is not. That is why there is a Fedora/RHEL split in the first place.
VimEscapeArtist 11 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, the first AI-generated Linux! Will it suck monkey balls just as much as Windows 11?
classified 10 hours ago [-]
That, and it will be as secure, reliable and snappy as GitHub!
Also, coming from Microslop, the path to ever deeper enshittification is a foregone conclusion. It will be the first "Linux" with ads!
theandrewbailey 6 hours ago [-]
> It will be the first "Linux" with ads!
Ubuntu 12.10 had Amazon shopping results when you searched from the main menu.
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?
pepperoni_pizza 18 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's desperate.
I'm thinking companies are now paying for Red Hat license and support on Azure VMs and Microsoft wants that money.
It's an easy thing for Microsoft sales guy to offer to your bosses' bosses' boss next time they're golfing and having expensive dinner together, "hey you can get your Linux also from us, it will save you money by consolidating vendors and whatnot".
I expect many companies will switch to this no matter how much worse it might be than what they had previously.
2b3a51 9 hours ago [-]
But if people are paying for RHEL they won't be using Fedora for production workloads will they?
szszrk 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
They are valued 4 trillon dollars, lots of FOSS stuff now depends on Microsoft's money.
Valve has to translate Windows and DirectX to have any meaningful games on the SteamDeck.
Only HNers to think Microsoft is desperate.
sourcegrift 20 hours ago [-]
Xenix was microsoft's. If you do ctrl-alt-f2 (to f7), you have Microsoft to thank
shaunpud 19 hours ago [-]
Surprised it doesn't have Copilot in the name somewhere
classified 10 hours ago [-]
That was a glitch, it will be fixed over the weekend. The responsible marketing director will be disciplined.
logicchains 18 hours ago [-]
Don't give them any ideas..
mattoxic 21 hours ago [-]
"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.
WD-42 21 hours ago [-]
Do people not realize that this just instantly torpedoes credibility and respect? I'm dumbfounded.
__MatrixMan__ 20 hours ago [-]
Did Microsoft have credibility and respect? They've been abusive towards their users for decades.
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
Got to meet those KPIs regarding using AI on the job.
I thought using AI for everything is the new cool.
trumpdong 17 hours ago [-]
No, that's last month. This month the CEOs are getting the AI bills from last month and saying everyone has to stop using AI
pjmlp 17 hours ago [-]
Sadly some of them have deep pockets.
ciupicri 5 hours ago [-]
Why are you saying it's an AI slop?
aykutseker 20 hours ago [-]
Moving from tdnf to dnf5 is interesting.
Most internal platforms get more bespoke over time, not less.
foltik 19 hours ago [-]
Even the LLM bot accounts are struggling to find something interesting about this.
reacweb 15 hours ago [-]
It is an Azure (and WSL) specific Linux based on a general-purpose Linux (fedora). Having this general-purpose foundation will give access to many packages.
nullpoint420 22 hours ago [-]
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish anyone? Although, as a Fedora user I'm happy it's RPM based.
giancarlostoro 22 hours ago [-]
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).
saghm 22 hours ago [-]
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.
brokencode 21 hours ago [-]
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.
dralley 1 hours ago [-]
The thing is that if step 2 isn't proprietary, but rather more open source code, then it's not "extinguish" it's just garden variety open source competition.
fc417fc802 17 hours ago [-]
Even then you can't seem to use RCS from outside of the Apple and Google walled gardens so it probably still counts as some sort of merged extinguish effort.
trumpdong 17 hours ago [-]
to be fair to apple one time, RCS is terrible
brokencode 13 hours ago [-]
It’s better than SMS and is the new industry standard.
Also, iMessage kind of sucks too. There are many better messaging apps.
The problem is that many people in the US never even try those. They just see that Androids have green bubbles and cause problems due to SMS.
simoncion 10 hours ago [-]
Hello! I'm a USian, so my telecom situation might be really weird when compared to the rest of the world, IDK.
> It’s better than SMS...
If it guarantees timely and in-order delivery, then yes, it's better than SMS. If it doesn't, no matter what else it does it's just as bad.
> ...and is the new industry standard.
Odd. The only RCS messages I receive are spam. Literally zero legitimate entities send me RCS messages.
Plus, I heard that Google's shipping this "Feed us more metadata about who you're calling and when!" service that's billed as a "Ensure the caller calling you is actually on an Android(TM) or iPhone(TM) phone!" "safety" feature. No thanks.
brokencode 7 hours ago [-]
Don’t use it if you don’t want. I’m not some kind of RCS salesman. I usually use third party apps myself. That doesn’t mean it’s not an upgrade versus SMS.
giancarlostoro 13 hours ago [-]
> common meme about Google killing their products as evidence of them extinguishing things.
I don't think anyone mentioned Google killing their products? I think you misunderstood my reference that was exclusively Microsoft[0] specific and has nothing to do with shutting down projects. Extinguish doesn't mean close it down in this context. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was a phrase from some Microsoft exec or VP about embracing some open standard, extending it beyond what it does, and then extinguishing the competition.
Google made Chrome, it was great, then they added things and features that sites often (VERY MUCH LIKE IE USED TO) say "You must use Chrome to visit this website." even when I'm on Firefox, and masking my browser agent enables the website. This is very "old evil" Microsoft like shennanigans.
Google made gmail, people used to have email clients, hell AOL had its own built-in email client with a GUI and all. Now everyone browses email via a browser and is hooked to gmail.
Before YouTube people used Kazaa, Shareazaa etc to share clips much like they do with YouTube, but now there's censorship and automatic censorship via copyright claims that the little guy cannot defend against. I follow amazingly good music YouTube channels that go deeply into how songs are made, which requires playing short samples, its 100% fair use, and gets me to listen to the original songs in many cases, but the record companies want to snag the easy cash so they're heavily discouraged since its time consuming work, fair use, and some goon at a Music company is jut flagging all their videos and profiting off someone else's hard work.
There's also Android, which embraced Linux, extended it and extinguished the competition (Ubuntu phone anyone? You know, an ACTUAL Linux phone).
There's also Google Talk / Google Voice / Google Chat / GChat (and the 5000 other names for it!) which was built on top of XMPP. I even tested logging into gmail once, and messaging my facebook account (FB Messenger used to be XMPP!) and it worked. They eventually shut down the openness of XMPP and closed them up (both Google and Facebook[2]).
That's why they're pushing hardware attestation so aggressively
redmonduser 8 hours ago [-]
It's too late to embrace, extend and extinguish and Microsoft has moved past that era. I think this is an attempt to gate keep the inclusion of opensource libraries in the distribution that have contributions from unverified users and potential state actors.
tossit444 22 hours ago [-]
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.
mhitza 21 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
tigerlily 22 hours ago [-]
Extinguish Windows morelike...
egorfine 15 hours ago [-]
Embrace and extinguish.
This is why they call a very specialized distribution "general-purpose". They need to water down the term and own the new space.
tenderfault 16 hours ago [-]
I just finished tapping 381 times, disabling (hopefully most of?) Apple Intelligence incursions in my life on a machine I don't really use. Was wondering what will I do next. Oh, look. More crap. That will keep me busy for a while.
fortran77 20 hours ago [-]
Microsoft was a *nix supporter from the very beginning, with Microsoft Xenix.
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
There is even an interview of Bill Gates where he talks about UNIX as the future of computing, naturally with Xenix, how things turn around.
I would rather say UNIX won the server room, Linux just happens to be the UNIX clone most people hack on nowadays, and can change tomorrow as companies take over and people like Linus eventually pass the torch.
You can already see that on embedded, other FOSS OSes are being adopted, without GPL licensing, like Zephyr, NutXX, FreeRTOS,...
trumpdong 17 hours ago [-]
a distro is the opposite of an application
cbdevidal 10 hours ago [-]
Correct, but who 25 years ago could have imagined they’d have gone so far as to roll their own? I remember the Balmer days.
But the fact that they’re rolling a distro tells me they’re likely also writing software for Linux. I’m sure their Azure Linux contains apps they wrote and maintain, used by the OS.
Then there’s Microsoft apps on Android, with Linux under the covers.
fortran77 9 hours ago [-]
I develop C#/F# applications in Windows that run on Mac OS, iOS, Linux, and Windows. It's by far the best environment for this sort of thing. You can get native performance in a much lighter environment than those crappy electron apps.
megous 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
More like Microsoft's first non Microsoft Azure distro.
jdw64 20 hours ago [-]
What advantages does Azure Linux have compared to Ubuntu?
speedgoose 20 hours ago [-]
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.
olavgg 18 hours ago [-]
When I look at the oil & gas sector, I remember MS-DOS + Wordperfect was the beginning. Then Windows 3.1 + Microsoft Office took over, and since that, its been Microsoft, Azure, and SAP.
They refuse Google Cloud, AWS, and many still believe open-source is cancer. They are Microsofts best customers. They prefer consultants over hiring software developers, and the consultants just to what they're told and never question the status quo.
Whenever I spending time at these companies, my head is filled with dinosaurs.
Where I live we have something called The ONS event/Exhibition, where the oil sector gathers to promote themself. 2 years ago AWS had a big stand there, but it was mostly empty. This year, AWS doesn't participate at all.
speedgoose 15 hours ago [-]
Yes I think we live in the same country.
2b3a51 9 hours ago [-]
Oil and gas? Dinosaurs? Can see the connection. Good luck with it next time you are with them.
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
Just like Amazon, Google and even Vercel have their own distros.
To have full integration with their cloud services, instead of a random purpose Linux distro.
And accountability.
jdw64 20 hours ago [-]
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.
nullbio 10 hours ago [-]
Was it vibe coded?
drnick1 21 hours ago [-]
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.
Krutonium 21 hours ago [-]
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.
999900000999 21 hours ago [-]
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.
overfeed 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pjmlp 14 hours ago [-]
Nope, they just doubled down on Linux containers integration on Windows, with CLI and OS APIs to drive them from C, WinRT and .NET, that is the main way they see Linux going forward.
Azure Linux 4.0 will be the new WSL default distro, after going into stable.
Source, Linux sessions at BUILD 2026.
makeitdouble 21 hours ago [-]
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.
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]
murkt 20 hours ago [-]
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
madspindel 20 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure he meant Satya Nadella but picked the wrong name...
makeitdouble 20 hours ago [-]
Sorry it was a brain fart. I meant Satya Nadella.
murkt 20 hours ago [-]
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.
santoshalper 21 hours ago [-]
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.
warumdarum 21 hours ago [-]
How many percent of their revenue funel are dependent directly or indirectly on windows beeing the peoples workstation funneling them towards their subpar products?
philistine 9 hours ago [-]
In the Enterprise, they'll fight tooth and nail to maintain that synergy. In the small business and consumer markets, people are having a very slow divorce from Windows, and Microsoft is well aware. MS365 is an ok product and can absolutely thrive on its own without Windows.
kenjackson 20 hours ago [-]
Probably some amount. I agree Windows is strategic, but do definitely could see them giving it away and/or fully open sourcing it.
pjmlp 14 hours ago [-]
It is most likely impossible, given the amount of code that is probably still under contractors copyright, or other kinds of licenses.
rswail 13 hours ago [-]
They don't have to provide the source to give the OS away for free.
The difference between BSD and GPL in one sentence.
DANmode 17 hours ago [-]
I’ll never use anything carrying the Azure name for anything I care about.
There, I said it.
18 hours ago [-]
smitty1e 22 hours ago [-]
[laughs in Torvalds.]
tenderfault 16 hours ago [-]
[laughs in Gates]
PunchyHamster 17 hours ago [-]
Why on earth they'd base it on Fedora where Ubuntu or Alpine is the most common use ? It just adding friction and incompatibilities to most users use case
I am not exactly waiting for Linux that will have obligatory ads and will take screenshots of my desktop and send them somewhere. Sorry Bill, but now, I've been through this already, I saw how superior DR DOS goes down because your mom was IBM board member, I had to use Windows 98 Millenium Edition, I was lucky to skip Windows Vista. So, again, no, thanks, never again.
Same with your cloud offering, ridiculous solutions like Azure Service Bus that has pathetic performance, pathetic API and high price.
kobie12 17 hours ago [-]
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jocelyner 18 hours ago [-]
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surcap526 15 hours ago [-]
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unethical_ban 22 hours ago [-]
Tldr a MSFT maintained fedora fork tuned for Azure hardware.
1. It's general purpose in that it is designed to be used to deliver any application software, whether containerized, on a VM or on (specific) bare hardware.
2. It has an SBOM that allows all elements of the distribution when run as a container/VM/bare to have an auditable chain back to the Fedora distribution, which then has a chain back to the source. So that allows companies to comply with the requirements of security audits much better than the "run our automated tool in your kernel to keep you up to date".
3. It's effectively a read-only OS, especially as containers, with that same auditable supply chain.
So no, it won't run on general hardware with random selections of ethernet and wifi and sound and display variations, but it will run any general application in numerous environments with an auditable supply chain.
FWIW, it's only the HN title and this article that calls this new distribution "general-purpose". Microsoft themselves say that this the distribution is "Purpose-Built for Azure" (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/linuxandopensourceb...), I'm not sure how the author got it wrong.
No, it IS important because it comes from Microsoft.
>If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won. - Linus Torvalds
Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine this would happen. Microsoft spent a decade trying to kill Linux via SCO lawfare. Linux has won. Microsoft is completely and utterly defeated.
All the way to the bank, apparently.
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.
You and Microsoft are using the word "general purpose" to mean different things.
This is not generally compatible with different hardware.
Nor does it include things that could be considered applications, like desktop environments etc. It's not designed to be run by an end user on a desktop.
> Here is a general purpose Linux distribution, give it a try!
Where does your mind go? That this is a server-only distribution meant for a specific provider? Or that it's something like Debian, that could be run on servers and desktops alike without much tinkering, or meant for any provider?
FWIW, Microsoft themselves don't seem to call this a "general purpose Linux distribution", I could probably guess why, what Microsoft themselves say is "Purpose-Built for Azure" which sounds much more accurate. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/linuxandopensourceb...
I think the author might have confused (unintentionally or intentionally, who knows?) "general purpose" with "Purpose-Built for Azure", since Microsoft's own announcements get this right, while submission article is littered with this mistake.
I'd agree both could be used in a general-purpose way, but I'd definitively call one of them more general-purpose than the other.
That would likely be a better recommendation than android.
"General purpose" Linux distributions (not "server") typically would include a GUI desktop.
What are some major Linux distributions that are only headless?
What is the market share of those Linux distributions compared to Linux distributions that have a GUI desktop?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think it's misleading and linkbait. The mods would decide what to use instead, this could be "Azure Linux 4.0, Microsoft's Linux distribution for its cloud" or something like this.
> It is minimal on purpose. Azure Linux ships only what cloud and server workloads need. There is no desktop, no GUI, no general-purpose sprawl.
If only the guy who was destined to close a disk operating system deal with IBM hadn’t been goofing around with his plane that fateful day.
We would all be using lisp machines, running smalltalk on microkernels that put the HURD to shame. Just imagine: instead of backslashes and drive letters, we’d have parens. Endless, syntactically-valid parens.
Or CP/M, probably that. But can it run doom?
Some confuse this with LDS-OS, which makes the user weirdly and unquestionably `nice` by only accepting inputs from protected mode.
Please don't spread lies about Gary.
For others who did not get the joke, Kindall was kind of a big deal:
https://computerhistory.org/blog/fifty-years-of-the-personal...
That future is not different from this future. That road leads down to Javascript and React anyways. (Perhaps with a slightly different syntax.)
Where is our PL any kind of bracket and other rococo ornamental symbol is at most totally optional?
It’s not the average joe/jane though.
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?
and I meant where I come from a general purpose OS is for any purpose, not just to run it on a very specific stack.
SUSE - Find Certified Hardware Products https://www.suse.com/yesCertified/home
similar pages exist for RH and canonical
but then Windows also is a general purpose OS.
hm.
what if MS strategizes on their hyper-v as hypervisor, with windows as control Panel and all payload on their Azure Linux? popcorn time?
On-prem hardware support would be interesting, wouldn't it?
their plan might however be a Micro-Windows, which only boots the hyper-v, which then runs that Linux. that move would leverage the Microsoft Windows hardware certification.
Now they are snapshotting the bleeding-edge distribution and call it general purpose, which carries a strong implication that it is ready for all kinds of production workloads.
It is not. That is why there is a Fedora/RHEL split in the first place.
Also, coming from Microslop, the path to ever deeper enshittification is a foregone conclusion. It will be the first "Linux" with ads!
Ubuntu 12.10 had Amazon shopping results when you searched from the main menu.
Microsoft's Azure Linux (66 points, 4 months ago, 109 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805841
What's next?
I'm thinking companies are now paying for Red Hat license and support on Azure VMs and Microsoft wants that money.
It's an easy thing for Microsoft sales guy to offer to your bosses' bosses' boss next time they're golfing and having expensive dinner together, "hey you can get your Linux also from us, it will save you money by consolidating vendors and whatnot".
I expect many companies will switch to this no matter how much worse it might be than what they had previously.
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.
Valve has to translate Windows and DirectX to have any meaningful games on the SteamDeck.
Only HNers to think Microsoft is desperate.
Christ, they even lead with AI slop.
I thought using AI for everything is the new cool.
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.
Also, iMessage kind of sucks too. There are many better messaging apps.
The problem is that many people in the US never even try those. They just see that Androids have green bubbles and cause problems due to SMS.
> It’s better than SMS...
If it guarantees timely and in-order delivery, then yes, it's better than SMS. If it doesn't, no matter what else it does it's just as bad.
> ...and is the new industry standard.
Odd. The only RCS messages I receive are spam. Literally zero legitimate entities send me RCS messages.
Plus, I heard that Google's shipping this "Feed us more metadata about who you're calling and when!" service that's billed as a "Ensure the caller calling you is actually on an Android(TM) or iPhone(TM) phone!" "safety" feature. No thanks.
I don't think anyone mentioned Google killing their products? I think you misunderstood my reference that was exclusively Microsoft[0] specific and has nothing to do with shutting down projects. Extinguish doesn't mean close it down in this context. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was a phrase from some Microsoft exec or VP about embracing some open standard, extending it beyond what it does, and then extinguishing the competition.
Google made Chrome, it was great, then they added things and features that sites often (VERY MUCH LIKE IE USED TO) say "You must use Chrome to visit this website." even when I'm on Firefox, and masking my browser agent enables the website. This is very "old evil" Microsoft like shennanigans.
Google made gmail, people used to have email clients, hell AOL had its own built-in email client with a GUI and all. Now everyone browses email via a browser and is hooked to gmail.
Before YouTube people used Kazaa, Shareazaa etc to share clips much like they do with YouTube, but now there's censorship and automatic censorship via copyright claims that the little guy cannot defend against. I follow amazingly good music YouTube channels that go deeply into how songs are made, which requires playing short samples, its 100% fair use, and gets me to listen to the original songs in many cases, but the record companies want to snag the easy cash so they're heavily discouraged since its time consuming work, fair use, and some goon at a Music company is jut flagging all their videos and profiting off someone else's hard work.
There's also Android, which embraced Linux, extended it and extinguished the competition (Ubuntu phone anyone? You know, an ACTUAL Linux phone).
There's also Google Talk / Google Voice / Google Chat / GChat (and the 5000 other names for it!) which was built on top of XMPP. I even tested logging into gmail once, and messaging my facebook account (FB Messenger used to be XMPP!) and it worked. They eventually shut down the openness of XMPP and closed them up (both Google and Facebook[2]).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714557
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769
[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/linuxandopensourceb...
> 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.
Default configurations as well, since it states FIPS compliance it has to change defaults <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RemoveFipsModeSetup#W...>
This is why they call a very specialized distribution "general-purpose". They need to water down the term and own the new space.
Xenix was my introduction to UNIX.
"The Future of Xenix"
https://archive.org/details/Unix_World_Vol02_10.pdf/page/n21...
“If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.” ~Linus Torvalds
In this case, an entire freaking distro.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/internet-of-things-s...
I would rather say UNIX won the server room, Linux just happens to be the UNIX clone most people hack on nowadays, and can change tomorrow as companies take over and people like Linus eventually pass the torch.
You can already see that on embedded, other FOSS OSes are being adopted, without GPL licensing, like Zephyr, NutXX, FreeRTOS,...
But the fact that they’re rolling a distro tells me they’re likely also writing software for Linux. I’m sure their Azure Linux contains apps they wrote and maintain, used by the OS.
Then there’s Microsoft apps on Android, with Linux under the covers.
More like Microsoft's first non Microsoft Azure distro.
They refuse Google Cloud, AWS, and many still believe open-source is cancer. They are Microsofts best customers. They prefer consultants over hiring software developers, and the consultants just to what they're told and never question the status quo.
Whenever I spending time at these companies, my head is filled with dinosaurs.
Where I live we have something called The ONS event/Exhibition, where the oil sector gathers to promote themself. 2 years ago AWS had a big stand there, but it was mostly empty. This year, AWS doesn't participate at all.
To have full integration with their cloud services, instead of a random purpose Linux distro.
And accountability.
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 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...
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.
Azure Linux 4.0 will be the new WSL default distro, after going into stable.
Source, Linux sessions at BUILD 2026.
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]
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.
The difference between BSD and GPL in one sentence.
There, I said it.
"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."
And if you are still unsure. Checkout the repo:
* <https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux>
or more specifically, the releases
* <https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux/releases>
Same with your cloud offering, ridiculous solutions like Azure Service Bus that has pathetic performance, pathetic API and high price.