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> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

ISV certification is coming.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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

Don't give them any ideas..

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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).

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...

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.

Extinguish Windows morelike...

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...

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.

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.

Technically they gave mono to the wine project

>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.

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]

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.

[laughs in Gates]

Amazon Linux is based on Fedora as well.

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>