Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux
boxofcables.dev111 points by haydenbarnes 7 hours ago
111 points by haydenbarnes 7 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.
No it's not. It's for tuned for Azure. Nobody is running this outside of their compute environment.
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.
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.
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.
Yep sure does. Love an article that contradicts its own title. Bonus points for that sentence sounding extremely AI-generated.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That's not at all how it went down.
Please don't spread lies about Gary.
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:
https://computerhistory.org/blog/fifty-years-of-the-personal...
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?
I would imagine MS employees might (or be made to) either directly or through wsl.
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.
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
I'd say old fashioned Linux would come without any certification or support.
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.
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?
ISV certification is coming.
On-prem hardware support would be interesting, wouldn't it?
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.
I fell like this could be a move to purposefully mislead and confuse "Normies" of what to expect from "general purpose Linux" means.
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.
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
Surprised it doesn't have Copilot in the name somewhere
"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.
Did Microsoft have credibility and respect? They've been abusive towards their users for decades.
Got to meet those KPIs regarding using AI on the job.
I thought using AI for everything is the new cool.
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
Moving from tdnf to dnf5 is interesting. Most internal platforms get more bespoke over time, not less.
Even the LLM bot accounts are struggling to find something interesting about this.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...>
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
Xenix was microsoft's. If you do ctrl-alt-f2 (to f7), you have Microsoft to thank
I’ll never use anything carrying the Azure name for anything I care about.
There, I said it.
Microsoft was a *nix supporter from the very beginning, with Microsoft Xenix.
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.
Xenix was my introduction to UNIX.
"The Future of Xenix"
https://archive.org/details/Unix_World_Vol02_10.pdf/page/n21...
Also relevant quote that I think about when this subject comes up:
“If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.” ~Linus Torvalds
In this case, an entire freaking distro.
This is not the first distro coming out of Microsoft, see Azure Sphere OS.
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,...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 products?
Probably some amount. I agree Windows is strategic, but do definitely could see them giving it away and/or fully open sourcing it.
[laughs in Torvalds.]
Microsoft are pieces of shit lads. Run by nonces. Also 4.0, first? Lord give me strength.
Read the article. MS have shipped 1.0-3.0 earlier...
"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
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.
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Tldr a MSFT maintained fedora fork tuned for Azure hardware.
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