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!
Is this available for wsl?
Is there there a site that documents what packedges are available?
Is this purely a cli distro or does it have a graphical environment?
There is no graphical environment, but you could probably pull that off with some tinkering. Well maybe not some, maybe a lot, but its not impossible. You can build/install anything just like any other distro.
It was initially based on deb in the earlier iterations of its life, but ultimately, we decided to use Fedora as a base as a good balance between stability and new feature enablement.
That decision also makes it easier for us to contribute to Fedora upstream and collab with others, for example AWS uses Fedora for the base of Amazon Linux too, so there may be ways we can work together to solve common problems. I'm not making any future/promise statements with that comment. My point is, we are happy to collab upstream, using real open-source, community pathways.
I've created and managed five distributions for two companies. I've found RPM to have slightly easier tooling across the whole stack, from developers building individual RPMs/specs up through building and managing 1000s of RPMs across multiple releases. The Fedora build model makes a great reference and source of tools for spinning your own distributions.
My experience over the years with a few Linux distributions is that rpm based distros always seem to give me more problems with dependencies and always seems harder to fix. These days I much prefer deb based distributions, mainly Ubuntu as I like their trade-off between stability and newer versions though I'm not a fan of snap packages.
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.
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.
I would have to write a book on it, but start with allowing people to create an azure account for an organization without having to buy O365. I kid you not I had to find a sidedoor portal in a Reddit post to do it otherwise it's simply not possible.
Every interaction with Azure is a pain. Just 3 weeks ago I was trying to use Artifact Signing, after spending one hour on outdated doc on how to set it up I get hit with Identity validation. I did all steps and still "in progress" still to this day. You charge 40$/month for "support" on Microsoft Q&A which we all know is a joke otherwise its 100USD just to get a ticket in to know why your process is so broken.
At this point I get better support on GCP which is telling.
“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.
When I said "we" I meant the group of folks who work on and care about Linux and open source at Microsoft and in a position to help affect change that comes in via feedback from the community.
But it's true. Microsoft's reputation is in the toilet. After everything from the ICC sanctions to the AI spam in Windows to this month's Patch Tuesday incident, everyone knows to avoid Microsoft products like their life depends on it.
But if you want an actionable idea here's one: make it a hundred times cheaper, or free. People use Oracle Cloud because it's free, even though Oracle is even worse than Microsoft. If you want people to use it, you know what to do.
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.
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.
Thanks, sorry for my tone yesterday. It was the end of a long frustrating work day.
Azure Linux does look interesting, thank you for working on it. Fedora is a great choice as a base image. Having a Fedora based distro designed to work well with WSL would be amazing! As a base image for apps though I'm curious how you manage the 6month release cycle. Are you planning on expended support, or would people using it need to upgrade every 6 months. I think the appeal of a Debian base is we only need to think about big upgrades every 2 years.
A few bits of Azure feedback I can think of now. Probably not directly related to what you work on, but just some of my experiences working with Azure for the last year.
1. The CLI is good, I think maintaining feature parity between the CLI and portal is really helpful and allows us to integrate with our internal infra more easily. Azure CLI is really the best part working with the service.
2. The management portal is really flaky. Like unknown error messages pop up when clicking on deployment logs. Sometimes the SSH or log tail functions just don't load at all and overall the experience just feels sluggish. I'm really not sure what can be done about this but I've been moving to the CLI just because the web interface is frustrating to work with.
3. The Microsoft documentation is really verbose and difficult to navigate in my opinion. Like we were looking in to hosting a Teams bot and those docs are full of emoji and full page articles like 'why did we make an SDK?'. I have to jump around several pages to get to what I need and even then the code examples in the docs are not actually in sync with the current version of the SDK library. It feels like AI was just set loose to write as much as possible. I think the problem is the information density of much of the documentation is very low. Maybe that's something that can be addressed going forward.
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.
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).
To answer all the comments in this thread at once, and this is my personal opinion, building a distro is easy, releasing a distro and supporting customers that use it is much harder.
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.
> 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.
How many Microsoft employees are working on Azure Linux in 2026 (full-time equivalents)?
Github Project Page lists ~ 195 contributors today.
Is Azure Linux relying on community contributions, and MS employees do not write code, justt review, plan, coordinate?
Or is it the other way around, Microsoft developers do most of the work, and occasionally accept a small PR and interesting feature requests from the community, here and there?
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?
we do work and collaborate in fedora upstream. the reason for having a separate distro is to serve a different audience. there are several things to balance like life/supportability cycle, hardware enablement vs. legacy work, etc.
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.
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.
i'm speaking on behalf of myself. While yes, this was true back in then day, that is very much not the philosophy nowadays. it's a different company with different leadership than those days.
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.
i used to call myself a "cloud engineer" 14 years ago, me and a friend developed a formal way to deploy thin clients using AWS as the host, and it worked well for everything including youtube videos. this was in 2009, we had both been working with AWS since the first "public" instances became available.
So i suppose when azure was announced and came out, i was acutely aware of what they offered, and it was, you know, marginally cheaper than the AWS windows servers, as azure didn't have to pay microsoft as much for DCE licenses, maybe.
But it makes sense they have Linux now, as i said, ecosystem lock-in...
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.
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.
You're just throwing out a lot of vague statements. You're not helping your case. What specifically did Microsoft do to open source, open format and free software? You're making some huge accusations that Microsoft made some decision that impacts democracies today. Such as?
How is Open OfficeXML a daily pox? Why not use ODF if it's such a disease?
Fallout from what exactly? Again this vague language is not helpful. What exactly was lost 20 years ago?
> 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.
I'm not sure why you jumped to the conclusion that meant a literal war. Of course there was no literal war. And Microsoft did not do everything it could kill Linux and OSS. That is some serious revisionist history. Instead of speaking in generalities like "Microsoft hates Linux" maybe use actual examples and facts.
I'm not sure why you say that's revisionist, your quotes line up with what I said.
Appreciate you calling me delusional for not echoing vague statements to make an OS a victim.
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