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

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

#101

Post by rigonkulous »

b33j0r wrote: post #56
codycharris wrote: post #13

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

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 pa…

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

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

#104

Post by speedgoose »

olavgg wrote: post #80
speedgoose wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 questio…

Yes I think we live in the same country.

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

#106

Post by pjmlp »

DeathArrow wrote: post #22
drnick1 wrote: post #15

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.

>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.

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.

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

#107

Post by pjmlp »

kenjackson wrote: post #46
warumdarum wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is most likely impossible, given the amount of code that is probably still under contractors copyright, or other kinds of licenses.

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

#108

Post by giancarlostoro »

saghm wrote: post #11
giancarlostoro wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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]).

[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

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

#109

Post by rswail »

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.

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

#110

Post by rswail »

jraph wrote: post #37
codycharris wrote: post #13

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.

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.

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