Hey! I’m part of the larger Azure Linux team. Glad to answer any questions. It is a tad late here though so drop em and I’ll get to them in the morning!
Is this available for wsl?
Is there there a site that documents what packedges are available?
Is this purely a cli distro or does it have a graphical environment?
There is no graphical environment, but you could probably pull that off with some tinkering. Well maybe not some, maybe a lot, but its not impossible. You can build/install anything just like any other distro.
It was initially based on deb in the earlier iterations of its life, but ultimately, we decided to use Fedora as a base as a good balance between stability and new feature enablement.
That decision also makes it easier for us to contribute to Fedora upstream and collab with others, for example AWS uses Fedora for the base of Amazon Linux too, so there may be ways we can work together to solve common problems. I'm not making any future/promise statements with that comment. My point is, we are happy to collab upstream, using real open-source, community pathways.
I've created and managed five distributions for two companies. I've found RPM to have slightly easier tooling across the whole stack, from developers building individual RPMs/specs up through building and managing 1000s of RPMs across multiple releases. The Fedora build model makes a great reference and source of tools for spinning your own distributions.
As for the US, having the laws on the books appropriately applied, resulting in a breaking up of the company would make me much more likely to opt for Azure.
For the remaining 96% of the world population that isn't the US, there's not much you can do, as the ICC case shows you to be an adversary. You'd have to show through big actions that you no longer are one.
I'm sure someone wants to reply "why so aggressive, they're doing their best, they don't have anything to do with the above". Almost certainly someone who wouldn't write this if I were replying to a Flock, ClearView, Paragon [0] or Palantir employee on here, despite Microsoft realistically being a much bigger societal threat - and top enabler of the former companies - in every way imaginable.
“We” feels a little insincere when you’re speaking on behalf of such a large corporation. I’m sure the comment had more to do with weaknesses of Azure as a whole rather than your team’s piece.
I would have to write a book on it, but start with allowing people to create an azure account for an organization without having to buy O365. I kid you not I had to find a sidedoor portal in a Reddit post to do it otherwise it's simply not possible.
Every interaction with Azure is a pain. Just 3 weeks ago I was trying to use Artifact Signing, after spending one hour on outdated doc on how to set it up I get hit with Identity validation. I did all steps and still "in progress" still to this day. You charge 40$/month for "support" on Microsoft Q&A which we all know is a joke otherwise its 100USD just to get a ticket in to know why your process is so broken.
At this point I get better support on GCP which is telling.
My company picked Azure. So I work with it every day and it is extremely painful to deploy anything that’s not a dotnet application on azure dev ops. One time the app service deployment pipeline just silently failed while trying to build our app. We only found out our new code didn’t deploy when someone asked about the new features expected to go out.
The management portal is super slow, every time you click a button it’s basically a roll of the dice whether the action will work or not.
And as with most things Microsoft these days there are reams of docs detailing every single feature, and none of it fucking works as described.
I will say, if you just want to deploy a quick app from VSCode from your local machine or whatever, it works great. But if you need anything off the golden path it quickly becomes frustrating.
Having watched MSFT slowly chip away at their traditional bread-and-butter OS model with things like OneDrive and Office in the browser, Azure and then WSL, and listening to the Acquired podcast episodes on Microsoft, I wonder why they haven't simply released a Microsoft Linux by now, if only out of pride?
Do they feel that by doing so they're broadcasting that they're no longer a computing philosophy leader, and merely a market preference fulfiller (which is itself a backhanded way of saying they meet market demand I guess).
To answer all the comments in this thread at once, and this is my personal opinion, building a distro is easy, releasing a distro and supporting customers that use it is much harder.
Ask a very simple question: how would this generate profits, which high level manager would be motivated to do this? Sure, 15-20 years ago corporations would've made vanity/critics-industry appeasing projects like this out of pride alone. Those times are over.
If it’s derived from Red Hat, I don’t understand why not simply work/collaborate with Red Hat on this rather than splitting the codebase and creating new forks?
we do work and collaborate in fedora upstream. the reason for having a separate distro is to serve a different audience. there are several things to balance like life/supportability cycle, hardware enablement vs. legacy work, etc.
How many Microsoft employees are working on Azure Linux in 2026 (full-time equivalents)?
Github Project Page lists ~ 195 contributors today.
Is Azure Linux relying on community contributions, and MS employees do not write code, justt review, plan, coordinate?
Or is it the other way around, Microsoft developers do most of the work, and occasionally accept a small PR and interesting feature requests from the community, here and there?
i know 2021 feels like a lifetime ago, but AWS had linux (Amazon Linux?) a decade before that (maybe even 18 years ago?) When i think "azure" i think AD, winserver DCE, and so on. Obviously if they want complete vendor lock in they have to have first party linux, too, rather than people doing hypervisors on VMs on hypervisors.
Are you sure about that? Everything I can find now and from when it was first covered suggests that it's an RPM based "distro" (let's not argue about whether it's technically a distro).
The TomsHardware article you linked to in turns links to ZDNet which in turn links to an InfoWorld article (isn't modern reposted rehashed "news" slop just fucking delightful) about the "release" of CBL-Mariner notes that it was created as a replacement to the then-recently-deprecated RedHat CoreOS, and references that (at the time) MS had a deal with a company that was supporting a CoreOS fork.
Given those two factors, it isn't impossible but it seems hard to believe that they would use a Debian base but then Frankenstein RPM package manage into it.
Hey! I’m part of the larger Azure Linux team. Glad to answer any questions. It is a tad late here though so drop em and I’ll get to them in the morning!
Is this available for wsl? Is there there a site that documents what packedges are available? Is this purely a cli distro or does it have a graphical environment?
It is not published in the store yet for WSL, but you can use it in WSL using the instructions here: https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux/issues/10997
There is no graphical environment, but you could probably pull that off with some tinkering. Well maybe not some, maybe a lot, but its not impossible. You can build/install anything just like any other distro.
Why RPM and not DEB or something more modern? Is it for Read Had compatibility?
It was initially based on deb in the earlier iterations of its life, but ultimately, we decided to use Fedora as a base as a good balance between stability and new feature enablement.
That decision also makes it easier for us to contribute to Fedora upstream and collab with others, for example AWS uses Fedora for the base of Amazon Linux too, so there may be ways we can work together to solve common problems. I'm not making any future/promise statements with that comment. My point is, we are happy to collab upstream, using real open-source, community pathways.
I've created and managed five distributions for two companies. I've found RPM to have slightly easier tooling across the whole stack, from developers building individual RPMs/specs up through building and managing 1000s of RPMs across multiple releases. The Fedora build model makes a great reference and source of tools for spinning your own distributions.
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Not even at gunpoint would I choose Azure as my cloud provider but great for Linux
Neat. What can we do better?
There's quite a bit you could do better.
As for the US, having the laws on the books appropriately applied, resulting in a breaking up of the company would make me much more likely to opt for Azure.
For the remaining 96% of the world population that isn't the US, there's not much you can do, as the ICC case shows you to be an adversary. You'd have to show through big actions that you no longer are one.
I'm sure someone wants to reply "why so aggressive, they're doing their best, they don't have anything to do with the above". Almost certainly someone who wouldn't write this if I were replying to a Flock, ClearView, Paragon [0] or Palantir employee on here, despite Microsoft realistically being a much bigger societal threat - and top enabler of the former companies - in every way imaginable.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/02/trump-immigr...
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In the last few months, this place is turning into Slashdot 2.0. So you're going to encounter people still seething about the 1990s.
“We” feels a little insincere when you’re speaking on behalf of such a large corporation. I’m sure the comment had more to do with weaknesses of Azure as a whole rather than your team’s piece.
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I would have to write a book on it, but start with allowing people to create an azure account for an organization without having to buy O365. I kid you not I had to find a sidedoor portal in a Reddit post to do it otherwise it's simply not possible.
Every interaction with Azure is a pain. Just 3 weeks ago I was trying to use Artifact Signing, after spending one hour on outdated doc on how to set it up I get hit with Identity validation. I did all steps and still "in progress" still to this day. You charge 40$/month for "support" on Microsoft Q&A which we all know is a joke otherwise its 100USD just to get a ticket in to know why your process is so broken.
At this point I get better support on GCP which is telling.
seriously, there is a huge issue with reputation and trust.
after what has happened with consumer products, how can anybody be sure its not going to happen on the server side?
Not be Microsoft, mostly.
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I can't believe it is that bad!
My company picked Azure. So I work with it every day and it is extremely painful to deploy anything that’s not a dotnet application on azure dev ops. One time the app service deployment pipeline just silently failed while trying to build our app. We only found out our new code didn’t deploy when someone asked about the new features expected to go out.
The management portal is super slow, every time you click a button it’s basically a roll of the dice whether the action will work or not.
And as with most things Microsoft these days there are reams of docs detailing every single feature, and none of it fucking works as described.
I will say, if you just want to deploy a quick app from VSCode from your local machine or whatever, it works great. But if you need anything off the golden path it quickly becomes frustrating.
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It isn't.
I have done projects across Azure, AWS and GCP, and without a doubt would always pick Azure.
AWS is a master in complexity, one almost requires a PhD in cloud infrastructure to make sense of how everything works.
GCP is the usual "talk to the bots" when something happens, unless it gets escalated.
Azure can be as complicated as AWS, or one can enjoy the nice GUI tooling similar in spirit to VS or InteliJ like confort.
Even for timesharing like workflows with a cloud shell and Web IDE, it appears AWS and GCP take pride on being a clunky bad experience.
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Nothing new,this is meant for their cloud Linux boxes.
Not meant to replace windows 11 as others are suggesting
Having watched MSFT slowly chip away at their traditional bread-and-butter OS model with things like OneDrive and Office in the browser, Azure and then WSL, and listening to the Acquired podcast episodes on Microsoft, I wonder why they haven't simply released a Microsoft Linux by now, if only out of pride? Do they feel that by doing so they're broadcasting that they're no longer a computing philosophy leader, and merely a market preference fulfiller (which is itself a backhanded way of saying they meet market demand I guess).
To answer all the comments in this thread at once, and this is my personal opinion, building a distro is easy, releasing a distro and supporting customers that use it is much harder.
Conceding superiority to Linux would make them a computing philosophy leader.
If left at that. More likely to committee infect in reality.
Ask a very simple question: how would this generate profits, which high level manager would be motivated to do this? Sure, 15-20 years ago corporations would've made vanity/critics-industry appeasing projects like this out of pride alone. Those times are over.
Is Azure running its hypervisors on Linux these days? I read awhile back that they were switching from Windows
No. It’s still very much Hyper-V running a custom build of what you can call windows underneath.
It is called Azure Host OS.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...
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It is still Azure Host OS, officially.
There was a project to add Hyper-V like capabilities to Azure Linux fork, but they went silent after the announcement.
Wasn't part of one of the big lawsuits 30 years ago that Microsoft could not market a UNIX derivative?
Interesting question. I remember M/S sold or spun off Xenix, but I thought that was due to them wanting to focus on DOS and Windows.
Found this and the answer is "no" :) Seems they rid of it due to Bell Labs breakup, see "Transfer of ownership to SCO":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
Yeah, it was before the bigger antitrust suits but IIRC it was part of what set the stage for them
How is Linux a Unix derivative apart from some guy in Finland reading a sysV syscall manual in 1990?
I don't think SCO's claim ever got adjudicated but it was enough to let them shake down multiple companies
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I mean Microsoft actually had a quite successful UNIX derivative named Xenix in the 80s (later sold to SCO).
Right, that was mentioned in the case IIRC; they didn't want that to happen again
If it’s derived from Red Hat, I don’t understand why not simply work/collaborate with Red Hat on this rather than splitting the codebase and creating new forks?
we do work and collaborate in fedora upstream. the reason for having a separate distro is to serve a different audience. there are several things to balance like life/supportability cycle, hardware enablement vs. legacy work, etc.
How many Microsoft employees are working on Azure Linux in 2026 (full-time equivalents)? Github Project Page lists ~ 195 contributors today.
Is Azure Linux relying on community contributions, and MS employees do not write code, justt review, plan, coordinate? Or is it the other way around, Microsoft developers do most of the work, and occasionally accept a small PR and interesting feature requests from the community, here and there?
even microsoft knows better than to use windows for infrastructure.
qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom AzureLinux-3.0-x86_64.iso -boot d -m 2048
Even Microsoft is betting on Linux now. No wonder given Win11 not being popular! :D
Azure has been using Linux from the beginning.
Genuine question: Is Azure a giant Kubernetes cluster?
While I agree Windows 11 is abysmal, Azure Linux is nothing new.
The strategy "Embrace, extend and extinguish" by Microsoft even has its own Wikipedia page.
Conspiracy theory
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> now
This has been true from day 1.
As you saw the repo has been around for quite some time.
You wanna take a look at the age of those commits again?
I wonder where this sits in the “Embrace, extend and extinguish” cycle. I would avoid this distro like the plague for fear of future lock-in.
Where is the downvote button? Remember: it's EEE all the way.
Torvalds wept.
nah, he loves it.
Torvalds is a huge supporter of tivoization and thinks the GPLv3 was a mistake.
The John11:35 allusion appears to have escaped everyone. Oh well.
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damn when did this come out?
Technically, Azure Linux was announced long time ago, but it was named CBL-D / CBL-Mariner.
The "Azure Linux" brand was released in 2023: https://devclass.com/2023/05/25/azure-linux-released-at-buil...
But the CBL-Mariner distribution (based on Debian) has existed since long before, and I believe it was formally announced sometime in 2021: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-released-cbl-mar...
i know 2021 feels like a lifetime ago, but AWS had linux (Amazon Linux?) a decade before that (maybe even 18 years ago?) When i think "azure" i think AD, winserver DCE, and so on. Obviously if they want complete vendor lock in they have to have first party linux, too, rather than people doing hypervisors on VMs on hypervisors.
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> based on Debian
Are you sure about that? Everything I can find now and from when it was first covered suggests that it's an RPM based "distro" (let's not argue about whether it's technically a distro).
The TomsHardware article you linked to in turns links to ZDNet which in turn links to an InfoWorld article (isn't modern reposted rehashed "news" slop just fucking delightful) about the "release" of CBL-Mariner notes that it was created as a replacement to the then-recently-deprecated RedHat CoreOS, and references that (at the time) MS had a deal with a company that was supporting a CoreOS fork.
Given those two factors, it isn't impossible but it seems hard to believe that they would use a Debian base but then Frankenstein RPM package manage into it.
Pandemic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Linux
Panzure!
This is the most absurd news I have read in a while. I for one welcome our new open source overlords.
How is this different from Amazon Linux - the base for EC2/etc?
Does amazon make an OS like Windows? Did Amazon wage a multi year long war against Linux and the open source philosophy in its history?
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Both are Fedora/Red Hat based.