Microsoft surprises with its first server Linux distribution: Azure Linux 4.0

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?

I have 5.25 diskettes of "Microsoft Linux" from the 1990s. I'm reasonably certain that was the first.

Fedora-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.

I'm surprised that people consider this a victory. It just shows how much open source became irrelevant to users' freedom.

Don't use this. Don't encourage Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

https://gamesbymason.com/blog/2026/microsoft/

Prediction: Microsoft Is Going To Do The Funniest Thing Imaginable this guy called it loooong back

> 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.

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...