Microsoft's Azure Linux

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

History & Positioning of Azure Linux

  • Azure Linux has existed for several years under earlier names (CBL-D / CBL-Mariner); the “Azure Linux” brand is from 2023.
  • Commenters note AWS had its own Linux distro long before; Azure Linux is seen as Microsoft “catching up” and tightening its ecosystem lock-in.
  • Multiple people stress it’s for cloud workloads, not a Windows 11 replacement or a general desktop distro.

Technical Base, Packaging & Usage

  • There’s confusion about whether it’s Debian-based; others correct that it’s RPM/Fedora-based.
  • Rationale given: Fedora offers a good stability/feature balance and facilitates upstream collaboration (including potential overlap with Amazon Linux, which also uses Fedora).
  • Some engineers report RPM tooling is easier across large-scale builds; others say RPM distros have been more painful for dependency issues than Debian-based ones.
  • No graphical environment is provided; it’s CLI-focused, though users could theoretically add a GUI.
  • Not yet a first-class WSL option in the store, but there are documented steps to run it under WSL.
  • Azure’s hypervisors still run on a specialized Windows derivative (Azure Host OS / Hyper-V), not on Linux.

Motives, Trust & “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”

  • Some see Azure Linux as evidence Microsoft is “betting on Linux” as Windows 11 struggles; others say Azure has used Linux from day one, so nothing new.
  • The old “Embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy is heavily debated:
    • One side treats it as historical fact with documented DoJ findings and cites SCO, Lindows, and standards manipulation as real harms.
    • Another side downplays talk of a “war” on Linux or says Microsoft today is a very different company constrained by competition.
  • This history fuels distrust; several commenters say they’d avoid Azure Linux out of fear of lock-in or on broader ethical/societal grounds.

Azure Experience & Ecosystem Feedback

  • Strong criticism of Azure’s portal: slow, flaky, UI changes not matching docs, features failing silently; many prefer the CLI.
  • Docs are described as verbose, marketing-heavy, low information density, and sometimes out of sync with SDKs.
  • Some users praise Azure’s GUI and tooling versus AWS/GCP; others have the opposite ranking, saying Azure is the most painful.
  • Azure Linux team members invite feedback, emphasize upstream Fedora collaboration, and note that maintaining and supporting a distro is far harder than simply building one.