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Microsoft Operating Systems Software Linux

Microsoft Surprises With Its First Server Linux Distribution: Azure Linux 4.0 (zdnet.com) 64

Posted by BeauHD from the surprise-announcements dept.
Microsoft is turning Azure Linux into a general-purpose, Fedora-based cloud distribution available to all Azure customers, while also productizing Flatcar as Azure Container Linux for immutable container hosts. "When Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation, there was this big conspiracy theory that somehow the Linux Foundation was undermining open source in partnership with Microsoft, and now you announce that you're shipping a Linux distribution," Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's CEO, said in response to Microsoft's surprise announcement. "That's amazing." ZDNet reports: Until now, [Lachlan Everson, Microsoft's Principal Program Manager on Azure's open-source team] noted, "we had Azure Linux only available to third-party customers through AKS specifically, and that was Azure Linux 3.0." Going forward, this will be ACL. Everson emphasized that Azure Linux 4.0 is the culmination of years of internal usage and the evolution of the earlier Mariner distribution. "So we've been running Azure Linux for many years internally, and we got through to 3.0, and we only allowed it on as a container host on AKS. What we've done is make it a general-purpose, so this is all the learnings that we've had in the heritage of Mariner."

Under the hood, Azure Linux 4.0 is based on Fedora Linux and is delivered as an open distribution on GitHub. This code is available now. Yes, Red Hat knows that Microsoft has done this. Everson continued, "So, we made a decision to use Fedora as an upstream, so it's using RPMs in the Fedora ecosystem. Microsoft curates the packages and the supply chain to fit Azure's cloud platform." Microsoft also created "it to be purpose-built for Azure, which integrates vertically into all of our infrastructure to give you the best Azure Linux experience on Azure." While Azure Linux will ship as a VM image, Microsoft is already preparing a developer-friendly path onto Windows desktops: "And as of today, we have it as a VM image for your VM host on Azure. We're going to announce WSL images as well."

While developers will be able to run Azure Linux locally through WSL, Microsoft is not positioning it as a traditional desktop Linux. Asked whether he could run it on his laptop, Everson said: "I will be able to run it on my laptop, or what have you. Yes, on Windows 11." However, when pressed about a desktop experience, Everson was clear that there are "no plans" for a graphical environment. "It's optimized for server-side in the cloud," he said, adding that even on a developer machine, users should expect a lean environment. "Minimal packages, yeah. The idea is that we offer you a consistent experience to do your development on your machine, and that you can take your workloads as you develop them on your machine and run them with VS Code. You can run your applications on that, and know that the platform is the same that you're running on the cloud, so that you have that kind of consistency between environments."

Flatcar itself remains the upstream project, but Microsoft is packaging it for Azure customers. Everson described Flatcar as "purpose-built, immutable, secure by default, production-ready operating system, and Azure Container Linux is the productization of that, but we're still investing in the upstream Flatcar ecosystem and pulling that downstream into a productized exterior experience just for container workloads, so it's a container hosting in AKS." To underscore the immutable model, he added that "Everything's baked in, so there is no package manager. We bake the bits into the immutable, and they're in the immutable version. So Azure Container Linux is the immutable version. So you shouldn't be changing any system packages or any application packages. Anything that you need to change is customer workloads run in containers."

Microsoft Surprises With Its First Server Linux Distribution: Azure Linux 4.0 More | Reply

Microsoft Surprises With Its First Server Linux Distribution: Azure Linux 4.0

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  • Wrong name. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by johnnys ( 592333 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @12:08PM (#66151229)
    It should have been called Borg Linux.
  • Embrace, Extend, Extinguish it is who they are and that will never change this late in the game.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 )

      lol, shashdotters are an adorable lot, forever living in the past

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Himmy32 ( 650060 )

      If this is that old strategy they are going about it pretty wrong, because it's pretty hard to maliciously extend standards as a downstream of a major distro...

      But it can also be pretty well explained by their financial interests of having things work well in their cloud so that they can get paid. Microsoft doesn't heart Linux for public good, but to get paid. And if the community gets some contributions along the way, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

  • In other late breaking news, wolves in some western states have been accused of purchasing sheep's clothing. When asked for comment one wolf barked, "we are purchasing 'cheap' clothing, nothing to see here."

    • Further down on that page, I saw a link to an article entitled "Hell Freezes Over."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Himmy32 ( 650060 )
      More like the wolves have found that they can make a better living herding sheep than just eating them. Thus have released a fences 4.0 spec to convince more people to choose them as wolf-based sheep management company. Rather than their previous game plan of trying to sabotage fences.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dutt ( 738848 )

      This is definatley Larson comic material.

      https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a0cc8... [chatgpt.com]

  • We've all expected Microsoft Linux at some point. Azure is probably a good proving ground for them. And now that they've flat-out denied that there will ever be a Microsoft Desktop Linux, we can start the countdown until the release of that. My guess is it'll be the Explorer shell running on top of a Linux Kernel, because they won't give up that terrible UI they've invested so much in and the familiarity will be far more important to the corporate users than the kernel running under it.

    • Azure Linux also comes with a command-line helper - ClippyAI! Leveraging the power of CoPilot, ClippyAI will help streamline your daily tasks... such as recognizing when you are writing a letter.

    • Re:Surprise? Everybody's been saying it. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @01:41PM (#66151373)

      I'm not so sure about the UI. The history of Microsoft and UI for the past 40 years is that they're happy to abandon their incumbent UI for different. We saw that with Windows 3.x to '95 and NT4, with Windows 98 and the integration of Spyglass Mosaic Internet Explorer, with the transition from Windows ME and Windows 2000 to Windows XP, the subsequent further transition from XP to Windows 7, and the rework from Windows 8.x to Windows 10. We even saw it with Windows 10 to Windows 11.

      They change their UI because their customers don't see the OS being new/different unless they change their UI. If the UI looks the same then the average untrained end user doesn't know the difference and doesn't see a value in spending the money to upgrade.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        In other words, they've made largely superficial changes (except 9x -> NT) quite consistently which haven't added much in terms of value.

    • because they won't give up that terrible UI they've invested so much in

      Most of the basic behavior of the UI used in Windows was inherited from IBM CUA, and is also shared by all of the commonest DEs for Linux. They also all have an analogue of the start menu. It's unclear what you're talking about here.

      • because they won't give up that terrible UI they've invested so much in

        Most of the basic behavior of the UI used in Windows was inherited from IBM CUA, and is also shared by all of the commonest DEs for Linux. They also all have an analogue of the start menu. It's unclear what you're talking about here.

        Mostly all the bullshit bolt-ons they've been shoveling the last five years or so. Copilot, AI everything, advertising in the bar, forced news pop-up if you accidentally let the mouse contact the wrong part of the bar that refuses to go away no matter where you click, and all the annoyances of MS exclusive UI "improvements" over the usual shared UI elements.

  • Meanwhile back in 2002 [slashdot.org] from What's the Business Case for Microsoft and Open Source? [slashdot.org]

    With apologies to Dr "Suse", to the tune of "Green Eggs and Ham".

    Linux can. Linux can .Use Linux

    That Linux can! That Linux can! I do not like that Linux can!

    Do you like open sourcing plan?

    I do not like that Linux can. I do not like the open sourcing plan.

    Would you like to free source share?

    I would not like to free source share. I would not like it anywhere. I do not like open sourcing plan. I do not like that Linux can.

    Would you like it very stable? Would you like it to enable?

    I do not like it very stable. I do not like it to enable. I do not like to free source share. I do not like it anywhere. I do not like the open sourcing plan. I do not like that Linux can.

    Would you use it in a X-Box? Would you use it if it ROCKS?

    Not on X-box. Not if it rocks. Not if very stable. Not to enable. I would not let them free source share. I would not let them anywhere. I would not allow open sourcing plan. I do not like that Linux can.

    Would you? Could you? In your biz? Use it! Use it! Here it is.

    I would not, could not, in our biz.

    You may like it. You will see. You may like it if it's free!

    I would not, could not if it's free. Not in our biz! It should never be!

    I do not like it on the X-box. I do not like it that it rocks. I do not like it amongst our biz. I do not like it that it is. I do not like they free source share. I do not like that anywhere. I do not like that Linux can. I do not like you Linux man!

    service! service! service! service! Could you, would you, as a service?

    Not as a service! Not if it's free! Not in my biz! Man! Let not it be! I would not, could not, on a X-box. I could not, would not, if it rocks. I will not use it if its stable. I will not use it even to enable. I will not let them free source share. I will not let them anywhere. I do not like open sourcing plan. I do not like that Linux can.

    Say! if in copyleft? always free copyleft! Would you, could you, copyleft?

    I would not, could not, in copyleft.

    Would you, could you, why so nervous?

    I would not, could not, I'm NOT nervous. Not as copyleft. Not as a service. Not in my biz. Not if it's free. I do not like that it can, you see. Not if it's stable. Not on X-box. Not to enable. Not if it rocks. I will not let them free source share. I do not like it anywhere!

    You do not like open sourcing plan?

    I do not like that Linux can.

    Could you, would you use what we wrote?

    I would not, could not, use what you wrote!

    Would you, could you, to avoid your bloat?

    I could not, would not, avoid bloat. I will not, will not, use what you wrote. I will not compete with them as a service. I will not because it makes us nervous. Not in our biz! Not if it's free! Not if it is! You let me be! I do not like it on the X-Box. I do not like it that it Rocks. I will not use it if it's stable. I do not like that it does enable. I do not like they free source share. I do not like it ANYWHERE I do not like open sourcing plan!I do not like that, Linux can.

    You do not like it. So you say. Try it! Try it! And you may. Try it and you may, I say.

    Man! If you will let me be, I will try it. You will see.

    Say! I like open sourcing plan! I do! I like that, Linux can! And I would use it because it's stable. And I could use it to enable... And I could charge for providing a service. And I could copyleft without being nervous. And in my biz. And still source free. For you can still charge for a service fee!

    So I will use it on the networked X-box. And I will promote it because it ROCKS. And I will use it because it's stable. And I will use it

  • Why is this surprising?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bothorsen ( 4663751 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @12:33PM (#66151267) Homepage

    The Linux community still responds to Microsoft as it was 30 years ago.

    Today, MS don't make the money on Windows, they make it on MS 365 and Azure. Which means they don't care if you use Windows or Linux, as long as you use their online service.

    You need to stop the Embrace-Extend, Borg Linux etc comments. It just shows ignorance. Although I did find Borg Linux funny :)

    But seriously, there is no conspiracy here. Sure, MS would prefer you use Windows. But it's such a small part of the amount of money their users pay them, that it's not a big deal.

    Look at their actual track record. They have done real contribution to Linux over the last 10 years or so. A lot more than most other companies you think are cool. But you still somehow perceive them as coming with an agenda that just doesn't exist.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Except it absolutely is Embrace-Extend...

      It is embrace Linux, just so long as your are running it on their compute...It is extend Linux,they have already used their influence to stuff all manor of rather cloud-specific tooling into systemd, and successfully crammed that stack down on the broader community.

      Finally it is extinguish in the software freedom sense the GNU side of GNU/Linux always cared about. Unless your are like beyond careful about every component you use, every bit of tooling you chose, and

      • Re:Why is this surprising?? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Himmy32 ( 650060 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @01:36PM (#66151363)

        Blaming Microsoft for systemd is Grade A crackpottery. Their Linux contributions have been GPL and of course are going to be related to the stuff they care about, but haven't pushed any parallel standards that would fracture the community. Not sure what you are getting about with the GNU comments, they didn't even pick a non-GNU coreutils/glibc distro like Ubuntu with the rust coreutils swap or even go with something busybox or alpine/musl based. (Not that those other FOSS projects would be bad choices.)

        As far as not being able to shift to any other cloud, this Linux distro is literally for their standards-based Kubernetes offering to make people be able run any Linux containerized workload run just like it would anywhere else. Just in an immutable environment where don't have to worry as much about the security of the underlying host. While also contributing to the Linux Foundation and the CNCF for their work released in a vendor-agostic manner.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

          You say that, but then ignore the funding source and board of directors for the orgs that Lennart worked for... sure. Totally just a coincidence.

      • >> just so long as your are running it on their compute <<

        What exactly is "a compute" --? Do you mean, on their computers? On their computing platform?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Himmy32 ( 650060 )

          That's the one part of their rant that makes sense. Microsoft isn't doing this out of the goodness of their heart, but it trying to get businesses to pay for running Containers and VMs on Azure by having a decent Linux Distro under the hood.

          So "compute" in this context is paying for managed services such as Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Container Apps, or Azure Virtual Machines which are priced by the computing power (number of vCPUs and memory).

          It's the same Microsoft hearts Linux because it makes them m [computerworld.com]

      • They've extended precisely nothing. In fact their Azure offerings continue to run stock standard releases of Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, and others. The only thing they've done is embrace and sell.

        And even if they did extend, to what end? The problem with the original Netware fight was the "extinguish" portion. But Microsoft not only gain zero benefit from extinguishing Linux, the world would completely ignore their attempts to do so and an effort to not allow standard Linux distributions to run on their cloud plat

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Microsoft still makes money on Windows. This isn't Microsoft Linux Home, it's a server version of Fedora with some Microsoft stuff intended to be run on Azure.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Himmy32 ( 650060 )

        Microsoft makes way more on Azure stuff. Which is why they did some things like shift PowerShell into their Azure segment and have stopped investing in things like local AD improvements for Entra ID and the like. Same goes with local Office, with them coming close to axing the perpetual licensed.

        So yeah Windows Server/Desktop/Office aren't free or anything. But Microsoft's not hiding that Azure/M365 offerings are the real things paying the bills.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      Azure is just not all that great. AWS, GCP, even Oracle and several other options have a lot of advantages, the main selling point of azure is being tied to windows and other legacy systems.
      If you have a clean slate you're much better off going with AWS or GCP.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Himmy32 ( 650060 )
        Azure's Kubernetes offering where this project really targets is actually pretty good. They've spent a lot to challenge GKE and EKS and it shows.

    • Today, MS don't make the money on Windows, they make it on MS 365 and Azure. Which means they don't care if you use Windows or Linux, as long as you use their online service.

      And if establishing their own Linux distro enables them to integrate Copilot into the distro, so they can hook more people into paying for their service, that's just (to them) good business.

  • Wait a second, Fedora based? (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @12:38PM (#66151275)
    From RedHat, owned by IBM? Have we gone full circle?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TWX ( 665546 )

      IBM is and has always been a services/consultant business, even when they made products.

  • Windows NT for MIPS and Alpha processors
    AIX for Apple hardware https://everymac.com/systems/a... [everymac.com]
    Solaris for IBM Z mainframes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    And of course the operating system that will outlive us all, OpenVMS for amd64 https://vmssoftware.com/about/... [vmssoftware.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      AIX has always run on Power/PPC, running it on an Apple branded PPC machine is not strange at all. Legacy macOS 10 was never meant as a server OS so it made sense to use something that was.

      IBM Z has run Linux for a long time, it's not surprising that people would port other open source systems to it like opensolaris, there's probably BSD ports too.

      • Legacy macOS 10 was never meant as a server OS

        Back when the OS MacOS is now based on was created, there was no distinction between workstation and server OSes. Therefore MacOS X not being intended as a server OS is a downgrade from the prior product... like many of the changes Apple made, especially the UI ones.

  • I'll bet it's logo will be a flying pig.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Himmy32 ( 650060 )

      They've been flying for a while. [slashdot.org]

      But it's not a really big surprise that Microsoft gets paid when people running their workloads in their cloud and companies want to run Linux VMs and Containers. Just like Microsoft being a big contributor to Linux [slashdot.org] but for the things that they care about and make money on (like making Linux work on Hyper-V or getting MSSQL run well on Linux).

  • ...is Evenson, not Everson. (I see it's "Everson" in the original, so I'm hoping sjvn reads /. and can fix this pretty quickly.) I'm glad to see Flatcar carrying on with the former Kinvolk team despite a fork and an acquisition (even though seemingly nobody who wasn't around back then knows about CoreOS or rkt any more). It's always felt like a cleaner model of operation than rpm-ostree to me.

  • ...it makes sense to have a headless server operating system when you're mostly running commodity spin-up/spin-down headless servers. Microsoft's server operating system was still largely based on the idea of running on a baremetal self-contained box, even though Microsoft servers had long, long since been used in the virtual machine space. If anything they're quite far behind the curve on this.

    The Novell Netware model adapted to the VM era is what makes sense, where the tools don't require logging in to

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Himmy32 ( 650060 )
      The why is to run Kubernetes and to a lesser extent VM workloads in their cloud. With 80% of big business running k8s workloads, they are competing with Google's GKE and Amazon's EKS for safe and performant Kubernetes environments. And then in the VM space Amazon Linux 2 is a popular distro in Amazon's EC2 offering. Polishing up and releasing standard offering and also a hardened up version with immutability and making upgrades / rollbacks atomic is reduces cloud management effort and letting engineers kick

    • The Novell Netware model adapted to the VM era is what makes sense, where the tools don't require logging in to the server at all in order to administer the environment.

      What? You absolutely had to authenticate to administer a Netware server, unless you did it from the console in the early days. That is logging in. If you don't think so, then neither is passwordless rsh, or ssh with a key and no password.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TWX ( 665546 )

        of course you have to authenticate, but you run all of the software to administer it on a client, not sitting at the console. The console had only the most barebones capability, usually user management. The tools to administer ran on the client.

  • but I cannot trust you further than I can spit a two-headed rat.

    • but I cannot trust you further than I can spit a two-headed rat.

      Well, if not a two-headed rat, how about a three-eyed fish? D'oh!

  • Remember when they ported VAX/VMS to PC architecture and put a Windows 3 GUI on top?

    That evolved.

    "Watch this space."

  • I think that’s a great message and positioning from Microsoft. They embraced it strategically, which says a lot about how critical open-source and cloud-native ecosystems have become in modern enterprise IT.

  • They chose the under-tested alpha version of an OS from a vendor who is running an attack on the GPL. What could possibly be less surprising than that? You need to recalibrate your surprise-o-meter.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Himmy32 ( 650060 )

      To be fair, they chose the yum/dnf route about 6 years ago with 1.0/CBL-Mariner before any of that saga and the previous version have been running in Azure solidly for those years. Moving to being a downstream of Fedora with one of two distros, providing back to a community rather than staying their own distro or not releasing a runnable distro isn't a great place to criticize them.

      Also the other distro they released is a downstream of a CNCF/Linux Foundation project [www.cncf.io] which is pretty immune to that criticism

  • Is it Open Source ? I didn't see that mentioned.

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