Microsoft's Azure Linux
49 points
2 hours ago
| 14 comments
| github.com
| HN
jaboutboul
34 minutes ago
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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!
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ajcp
12 minutes ago
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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).
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bandrami
16 minutes ago
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Wasn't part of one of the big lawsuits 30 years ago that Microsoft could not market a UNIX derivative?
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steve1977
4 minutes ago
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I mean Microsoft actually had a quite successful UNIX derivative named Xenix in the 80s (later sold to SCO).
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bandrami
3 minutes ago
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Right, that was mentioned in the case IIRC; they didn't want that to happen again
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zer0zzz
12 minutes ago
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How is Linux a Unix derivative apart from some guy in Finland reading a sysV syscall manual in 1990?
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bandrami
5 minutes ago
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I don't think SCO's claim ever got adjudicated but it was enough to let them shake down multiple companies
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Sytten
1 hour ago
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Not even at gunpoint would I choose Azure as my cloud provider but great for Linux
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jaboutboul
31 minutes ago
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Neat. What can we do better?
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deaux
8 minutes ago
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There's quite a bit you could do better.

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.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/02/trump-immigr...

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nophunphil
28 minutes ago
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“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.
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rolph
21 minutes ago
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seriously, there is a huge issue with reputation and trust.

after what has happened with consumer products, how can anybody be sure its not going to happen on the server side?

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flomo
19 minutes ago
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In the last few months, this place is turning into Slashdot 2.0. So you're going to encounter people still seething about the 1990s.
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fuzzer371
20 minutes ago
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Not be Microsoft, mostly.
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rolph
13 minutes ago
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you know feedback is being requested, you could put a little more quality into it, pretend they dont know what has ever been said about them before.

pretend your a manager, and you have to approach an employee about thier hygiene.

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osigurdson
40 minutes ago
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I can't believe it is that bad!
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yoyohello13
31 minutes ago
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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.

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Datagenerator
9 minutes ago
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Ditch the VScode virus before it hurts. LLM based action infiltration will rise in 2026 but rest assured, that doesn't work in NeoVIM/VIM.
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yoyohello13
3 minutes ago
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For sure, I don’t use VSCode and that’s part of what makes Azure so hard to use. All their stuff is built to support VSCode first.
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RockRobotRock
22 minutes ago
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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.
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kuerbel
13 minutes ago
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I like working with the cli instead of the portal. But even the cli is clunky.
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yoyohello13
10 minutes ago
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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.
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jaboutboul
27 minutes ago
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Would love to hear more about your frustration and how it can be fixed. Message me at my nick @microsoft.com please.
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pjmlp
26 minutes ago
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It isn't.

I have done projects across Azure, AWS and GCP, and without a doubt would always pick Azure.

AWS is a master in complexity, one almost requires a PhD in cloud infrastructure to make sense of how everything works.

GCP is the usual "talk to the bots" when something happens, unless it gets escalated.

Azure can be as complicated as AWS, or one can enjoy the nice GUI tooling similar in spirit to VS or InteliJ like confort.

Even for timesharing like workflows with a cloud shell and Web IDE, it appears AWS and GCP take pride on being a clunky bad experience.

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earthnail
13 minutes ago
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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.
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pjmlp
8 minutes ago
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Well then we have to agree to disagree, I will keep Azure on top of my list, AWS second and GCP last.
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binsquare
1 hour ago
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Nothing new,this is meant for their cloud Linux boxes.

Not meant to replace windows 11 as others are suggesting

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superb_dev
33 minutes ago
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Is Azure running its hypervisors on Linux these days? I read awhile back that they were switching from Windows
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jaboutboul
31 minutes ago
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No. It’s still very much Hyper-V running a custom build of what you can call windows underneath.
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pjmlp
23 minutes ago
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pjmlp
24 minutes ago
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It is still Azure Host OS, officially.

There was a project to add Hyper-V like capabilities to Azure Linux fork, but they went silent after the announcement.

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deafpolygon
5 minutes ago
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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?
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klipklop
6 minutes ago
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I wonder where this sits in the “Embrace, extend and extinguish” cycle. I would avoid this distro like the plague for fear of future lock-in.
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rolph
31 minutes ago
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even microsoft knows better than to use windows for infrastructure.
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natas
38 minutes ago
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qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom AzureLinux-3.0-x86_64.iso -boot d -m 2048
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shevy-java
1 hour ago
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Even Microsoft is betting on Linux now. No wonder given Win11 not being popular! :D
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thayne
1 hour ago
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Azure has been using Linux from the beginning.
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CodeCompost
15 minutes ago
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Genuine question: Is Azure a giant Kubernetes cluster?
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lynndotpy
1 hour ago
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While I agree Windows 11 is abysmal, Azure Linux is nothing new.
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jajuuka
26 minutes ago
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You wanna take a look at the age of those commits again?
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jansan
40 minutes ago
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The strategy "Embrace, extend and extinguish" by Microsoft even has its own Wikipedia page.
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jaboutboul
30 minutes ago
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Conspiracy theory
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mcintyre1994
25 minutes ago
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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.

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nophunphil
14 minutes ago
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You shouldn’t be posting replies like this on a public forum if you’re actually a MS employee.
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ane
15 minutes ago
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Now it is. In the late 90s/early 00s it wasn’t. MS is quite different today from what it was back then.
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rkachowski
23 minutes ago
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Are you speaking on behalf of Microsoft?
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randunel
21 minutes ago
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Are you really claiming the US-DoJ are conspiracy theorists?
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paulddraper
52 minutes ago
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> now

This has been true from day 1.

As you saw the repo has been around for quite some time.

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Datagenerator
18 minutes ago
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Where is the downvote button? Remember: it's EEE all the way.
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bchewyme
1 hour ago
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damn when did this come out?
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brunoborges
1 hour ago
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Technically, Azure Linux was announced long time ago, but it was named CBL-D / CBL-Mariner.

The "Azure Linux" brand was released in 2023: https://devclass.com/2023/05/25/azure-linux-released-at-buil...

But the CBL-Mariner distribution (based on Debian) has existed since long before, and I believe it was formally announced sometime in 2021: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-released-cbl-mar...

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genewitch
54 minutes ago
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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.
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osigurdson
36 minutes ago
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>> When i think "azure" i think AD, winserver DCE, and so on

That is interesting, when I think Azure, I just think "AWS" but in different regions and a clunky / overthought UI.

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RajT88
1 hour ago
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shevy-java
1 hour ago
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Panzure!
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unixhero
1 hour ago
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This is the most absurd news I have read in a while. I for one welcome our new open source overlords.
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jmspring
1 hour ago
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How is this different from Amazon Linux - the base for EC2/etc?
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pests
1 hour ago
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Does amazon make an OS like Windows? Did Amazon wage a multi year long war against Linux and the open source philosophy in its history?
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jmspring
1 hour ago
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Linux for their respective cloud resources. Neither is intended to really be a public distro.
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jajuuka
15 minutes ago
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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.
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paulddraper
50 minutes ago
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No.

Amazon wasn’t even a twinkle in its father’s eye.

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jaboutboul
28 minutes ago
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Both are Fedora/Red Hat based.
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