Microsoft surprises with its first server Linux distribution: Azure Linux 4.0
zdnet.comFedora-based, on GitHub here: https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux
An open-source Linux distribution built and optimized for Azure, with sources derived from Fedora Linux. Azure Linux provides a secured, reliable operating system for virtual machines, containers, and bare-metal platforms.
Azure Linux is built on a robust open-source foundation and enhanced with Azure-specific innovations. This provides the familiarity of the RPM package ecosystem, while adding Azure-native security, compliance, and operational capabilities.
Key features of Azure Linux include: hardened security posture, an Azure-optimized kernel, supply chain security, native Azure integration, and a predictable lifecycle.
It seems like you could just s/Azure/Amazon/g and get an only slightly different product.
https://gamesbymason.com/blog/2026/microsoft/
Prediction: Microsoft Is Going To Do The Funniest Thing Imaginable this guy called it loooong back
I remember a reading a similar prediction from several years ago, too, with more or less the same reasons. If I'm able to dig it up, I'll post a link.
It does make complete sense, doesn't it?...
There were a bunch of jokes about Windows being the most popular Linux desktop environment when WSL was released too.
The logic reminds me of what happened to Edge, it became a Chromium fork. If Windows starts using Linux, and they just make a better rendition of "WINE" it could be really interesting.
People will hate me for saying this, but if in fact Microsoft rolled their own distribution, it would mean a lot of Microsoft $$$ goes into developing, maintaining and hardening the kernel, with Linus Torvalds gatekeeping the changes.
I made this prediction years ago
Don't use this. Don't encourage Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Its an MIT licensed repository for something that is GPL licensed, I think you'll be okay.
Back in 1998, that would have been a legitimate concern…
Always remember: A leopard can't change his shorts.
> A leopard can't change his shorts.
But it can get old and lose its teeth...
Are you some AI that didn't get training past 1998? They have never stopped doing this.
I have 5.25 diskettes of "Microsoft Linux" from the 1990s. I'm reasonably certain that was the first.
Microsoft published its own UNIX from 1980 to 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix?wprov=sfla1
Xenix was Microsoft's first operating system, it predates DOS.
Admittedly, Microsoft did not actually write Xenix. They bought a System3 source license from AT&T and used that as a base, Their main service model was to port it to various systems.
Fun Fact: Xenix was the main reason a partition table was included when the PC first got hard disk support.
They developed something called M-DOS or MIDAS in 1979, but by that time CP/M was already established, so they decided against releasing it.
This was news to me, so I went digging.
« M-DOS
»During 1977 and 1978, Microsoft adapted both BASIC and Microsoft FORTRAN for an increasingly popular 8-bit operating system called CP/M. At the end of 1978, Gates and Allen moved Microsoft from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington. The company continued to concentrate on programming languages, producing versions of BASIC for the 6502 and the TI9900. During this same period, Marc McDonald also worked on developing an 8- bit operating system called M-DOS (usually pronounced "Midas" or "My DOS"). Although it never became a real part of the Microsoft product line, M-DOS was a true multitasking operating system modeled after the DEC TOPS-10 operating system. M-DOS provided good performance and, with a more flexible FAT than that built into BASIC, had a better file-handling structure than the up-and-coming CP/M operating system. At about 30 KB, however, M-DOS was unfortunately too big for an 8-bit environment and so ended up being relegated to the back room. As Allen describes it, "Trying to do a large, full-blown operating system on the 8080 was a lot of work, and it took a lot of memory. The 8080 addresses only 64 K, so with the success of CP/M, we finally concluded that it was best not to press on with that."https://www.pcjs.org/documents/books/mspl13/msdos/encycloped...
I was always curious on why their original product, BASIC, did not evolve into a full operating system. Looking at it with the sensibility of a unix affectionado. basic is sort of analogous to the unix shell, a unified interactive user interface and scripting language. This would appear to be a far superior interface than the relatively crippled CP/M inspired DOS command interpreter.
My best guess, memory, on those early microcomputers that consideration trumped any user interface ergonomics and DOS(cough CP/M) used less memory than the BASIC interpreter.
There was a rumor of MS and DRI having a non-aggression pact before 1981: https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/gary-kildall-bill-g...
Note that despite being named here as "Azure Linux" and being described as a "General purpose Linux OS for Azure", once you go to the product documentation it's referred to as "Microsoft Azure Linux Container Host for AKS", and the Quickstart guide is about how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster. It doesn't seem very capable of general use.
The docs aren't set to be updated until after the "official" announcement at Build in a couple weeks, but this is a good call-out. We'll see about getting this updated to clarify.
To date, its only external exposure was as a container host for AKS. This announcement is about also offering it as a general-purpose OS for VMs in Azure. The public preview will come in a few weeks, at which point you'll see documentation showing how to use it in that capacity.
Source: I lead the AKS and Azure Linux PM teams at Microsoft.
I'm surprised that people consider this a victory. It just shows how much open source became irrelevant to users' freedom.
Who considers this a victory? There isn't a single post in this whole thread so far saying anything like that. Nothing in the article is saying it's a victory either.
I guess it is good for Microsoft. By using fedora they can use red hats work. If Linux is cancer, then Microsoft is a parasite leeching off the cancer.
Oh great, more azure garbage. Azure is a pile of crap. My god I don’t understand how it can function
Many people predicted this coming sooner or later. I predict that end user Windows OS will some day die in favour of Linux. At first they will swap the kernel and next the userspace. Tell me crazy but so we told those back then.
I don’t really follow what they mean by no package manager. If you’re developing, won’t you need JavaScript or python or elixir or rust or go? This whole thing just run containers and your container still has to run some other distribution?
Flatcar (that it is based on) is designed to only run containers. So you don’t install any tools via a package manager, you would pull containers to do the work.
You can do one-off configuration by writing scripts to run when the machine first boots, but after that the whole system is immutable except for whatever containers you’ve configured
Thanks. I misunderstood that they are talking about Azure container linux and not Azure Linux 4.0 which will use Fedora's package manager.
These are called distroless. The concept is already existing for a while and it's used to ship your application, already packaged or built/transpiled by yourself.
> Minneapolis - So, there I was at Open Source Summit North America, listening to Brendan Burns, co-founder of Kubernetes and today Microsoft's Corporate VP of Azure Cloud Native and Management Platform, and Open Source, talk about the evolution from open-source to agentic AI. Then, in the middle of his presentation, he said, "When I started in Azure 10 years ago, it was not the majority operating system running on the Azure cloud. It has become the majority operating system running on the Azure cloud in the past 10 years. And today, I think we're really excited to announce that we're going to be having Microsoft's open-source Linux distribution, a supported version of Linux supported by Microsoft, available on Azure, out for anybody to use."
> I blinked. Backstage, Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's CEO, blinked, and all the Linux-savvy people in the crowd went "Huh?"
Any money I could have paid to be there would not have been enough to enjoy that reaction. Also that man has quite a background and title. Microsoft is company I like as a .NET developer, but they do some things wrong (so you could say I have a love and hate with them), but a lot of people don't realize they employ a lot of open source maintainers, and they release most of their software under the MIT license. Even .NET itself, is all MIT licensed.
Hell, the github for their Linux distro is MIT Licensed.
Shit, I would've gone if I knew it was in MN. Always some other time, I guess
MN is the reason I'm there. It's pretty fun.
WSL was the first public sign Microsoft had given up on windows.
On the contrary, Microsoft acknowledged those that buy NeXTSTEP evolution laptops to do Linux work, showing that actually any POSIX support will do, and since nowadays Linux distros have won the UNIX server room wars, they packaged Linux in a VM.
Just like Apple eventually did witn Virtualization Framework, because they cannot be bothered to keep pushing OS X Server.
Thus WSL alongside Virtualization Framework are the actual Year of Linux Desktop.
WSL is the classic MS time-honoured manouevre:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Are we at the ‘extend’ stage now?
No. Extinguish. They already introduced SystemD (svchost) and are now "taking care" of the windowing system.
SystemD predates anything Microsoft.
Additionally, they are within OSI licenses.
Is this a vibe coded slop fork of Fedora to go along with Winslop 11?
No thanks.
It finally happened, 23 years later! /s
https://web.archive.org/web/20251108032058/https://mslinux.o...
Heh.
> MS Linux is released under the provisions of the Gates Private License, which means you can freely use this Software on a single machine without warranty after having paid the purchase price and annual renewal fees.
It arose as a joke site from /., when and where people still had a sense of humor.
Good times. Reminds me of the following[1] classic: "What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit By A Bus?" - An Empirical Study
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150621191048/http://segfault.o...
It's funny how back in the days we used to think the worse a big corporation could do is charge you money. Those were simpler times.
Who cares?