Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux

https://www.boxofcables.dev/azure-linux-4-0-is-microsofts-first-general-purpose-linux/

by haydenbarnes • 2 months ago

215 151 2 months ago

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).

greenavocado• 2 months ago

That's why they're pushing hardware attestation so aggressively

nullpoint4202• 2 months ago

Agreed on the Google front here.

saghm• 2 months 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.

tossit444• 2 months 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.

[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/linuxandopensourceb...

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 months ago

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.

fragmede2• 2 months ago

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.

mhitza• 2 months 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.

Default configurations as well, since it states FIPS compliance it has to change defaults <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RemoveFipsModeSetup#W...>

tigerlily• 2 months ago

Extinguish Windows morelike...

redmonduser• 2 months 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.

froh4• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Don't worry you aren't. Luckily no one will use this distro day to day

haydenbarnes2• 2 months ago

ISV certification is coming.

On-prem hardware support would be interesting, wouldn't it?

froh4• 2 months 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.

steve19772• 2 months ago

I'd say old fashioned Linux would come without any certification or support.

froh4• 2 months 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.

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?

hsbauauvhabzb• 2 months 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.

starkgoose• 2 months ago

I fell like this could be a move to purposefully mislead and confuse "Normies" of what to expect from "general purpose Linux" means.

Scroll_Swe• 2 months 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.

unethical_ban• 2 months ago

Tldr a MSFT maintained fedora fork tuned for Azure hardware.

codycharris• 2 months ago

No it's not. It's for tuned for Azure. Nobody is running this outside of their compute environment.

VincePlatt• 2 months 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.

haydenbarnes2• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

osigurdson• 2 months ago

You may be right, its possible however that people running on Azure may use it locally for testing.

jraph2• 2 months 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.

gunalx• 2 months 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

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

stuaxo• 2 months ago

When he said "general purpose" I totally imagined a desktop environment.

rswail4• 2 months 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.

znpy• 2 months 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.

b33j0r3• 2 months 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?

psychoslave• 2 months 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?

hathawsh• 2 months 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.

qmr• 2 months ago

That's not at all how it went down.

Please don't spread lies about Gary.

otabdeveloper4• 2 months ago

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• 2 months ago

sigh .. and SGI would've been the ones to make the killer laptop which morphed into a slick metal pocket dependency for billions ...

tomkarho• 2 months ago

I would imagine MS employees might (or be made to) either directly or through wsl.

smitty1e• 2 months ago

[laughs in Torvalds.]

tenderfault2• 2 months ago

[laughs in Gates]

drnick1• 2 months 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.

santoshalper• 2 months 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.

kenjackson2• 2 months ago

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.

Topgamer7• 2 months ago

Technically they gave mono to the wine project

Krutonium• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

DeathArrow• 2 months ago

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.

pjmlp10• 2 months 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.

makeitdouble2• 2 months 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.

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]

murkt2• 2 months 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

mattoxic2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Do people not realize that this just instantly torpedoes credibility and respect? I'm dumbfounded.

__MatrixMan__• 2 months ago

Did Microsoft have credibility and respect? They've been abusive towards their users for decades.

pjmlp10• 2 months ago

Got to meet those KPIs regarding using AI on the job.

I thought using AI for everything is the new cool.

ciupicri• 2 months ago

Why are you saying it's an AI slop?

mattoxic2• 2 months ago

"Here is why that is a real step in Microsoft’s Linux journey, not just a version bump"

"It's not just this, it's a totally also that" Clause and CrapGPT love this phraseology.

gnabgib• 2 months ago

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

ramon156• 2 months ago

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?

szszrk• 2 months 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.

sourcegrift• 2 months ago

Xenix was microsoft's. If you do ctrl-alt-f2 (to f7), you have Microsoft to thank

pjmlp10• 2 months 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.

pepperoni_pizza• 2 months 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.

2b3a512• 2 months ago

But if people are paying for RHEL they won't be using Fedora for production workloads will they?

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187736

jdw642• 2 months ago

What advantages does Azure Linux have compared to Ubuntu?

speedgoose2• 2 months 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.

jdw642• 2 months 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.

pjmlp10• 2 months 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.

olavgg• 2 months 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.

fortran772• 2 months ago

Microsoft was a *nix supporter from the very beginning, with Microsoft Xenix.

pjmlp10• 2 months 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.

Xenix was my introduction to UNIX.

"The Future of Xenix"

https://archive.org/details/Unix_World_Vol02_10.pdf/page/n21...

cbdevidal2• 2 months ago

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.

aykutseker• 2 months ago

Moving from tdnf to dnf5 is interesting. Most internal platforms get more bespoke over time, not less.

foltik• 2 months ago

Even the LLM bot accounts are struggling to find something interesting about this.

solidarnosc• 2 months ago

Microsoft are pieces of shit lads. Run by nonces. Also 4.0, first? Lord give me strength.

xaerise• 2 months ago

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

* <https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux/releases>

shaunpud• 2 months ago

Surprised it doesn't have Copilot in the name somewhere

logicchains• 2 months ago

Don't give them any ideas..

classified2• 2 months ago

That was a glitch, it will be fixed over the weekend. The responsible marketing director will be disciplined.

piokoch• 2 months ago

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.

PunchyHamster• 2 months 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

rswail4• 2 months ago

Amazon Linux is based on Fedora as well.

DANmode• 2 months ago

I’ll never use anything carrying the Azure name for anything I care about.

There, I said it.

bananaquant• 2 months 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.

pjmlp10• 2 months ago

Amazon does exactly the same.

Piggy backing into Red-Hat work is exactly what everyone using CentOS was doing, but somehow that was ok.

tenderfault2• 2 months 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.

egorfine• 2 months 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.

reacweb• 2 months 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.

rswail4• 2 months 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-shape4• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Microsoft is completely and utterly defeated.

All the way to the bank, apparently.

pjmlp10• 2 months ago

Microsoft has already used Linux all over the place since Satya took over.

The time to be amazed was a decade ago.

megous• 2 months 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.

VimEscapeArtist• 2 months ago

Oh wow, the first AI-generated Linux! Will it suck monkey balls just as much as Windows 11?

classified2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

It will be the first "Linux" with ads!

Ubuntu 12.10 had Amazon shopping results when you searched from the main menu.

nullbio• 2 months ago

Was it vibe coded?

lanycrost• 1 month ago

I always prefer to use debian while it comes to linux. Seems you've just made some kind of Amazon Linux copy.

Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux

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