You get a sense of it now. Azure Linux 3.0 is the base for the WSL system distro, there all the WSLg (GUI) and now the wslc plumbing happens. It's ephemeral, but you can drop in and look around with wsl --system --user root. An official WSL image of Azure Linux 4.0 is coming in a few weeks that you'll be able to install with wsl.exe --install Azure...(I'm not sure the exact name).
call me old fashioned isn't a general purpose OS one that runs on any hardware and set up? and is certified with hardware vendors for full backing and support?
all this says is: "MS now provides a unified Linux from WSL to the MS cloud. just like what you got w/ SUSE RH canonical up to now. but without any support outside the MS stack.", right?
This is a nonevent, unless perhaps some genuine "general purpose" tools come out of this. MS will never contribute to things such as Wine and Proton and kill its golden goose.
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.
They could of also pulled an Oracle , claimed the APIs are copyrighted and sued.
WINE, even if right couldn't afford to fight.
I can even imagine official Linux support for the Surface tablets.
Infact, Microsoft makes very little off its consumer OS. They could even give up the market entirely and bless a distro with solid WINE support for legacy applications.
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.
>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.
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.
Microsoft could give Windows away for free and be fine. Of course it’s still a lot of money, so they’re not going to leave a multibillion dollar business on the table. But strategically, preserving its revenue is not their priority.
How many percent of their revenue funel are dependent directly or indirectly on windows beeing the peoples workstation funneling them towards their subpar ptoducts?
"Microsoft’s in-house Linux, the distribution that grew out of CBL-Mariner, just hit public preview as a general-purpose cloud OS you can run on any Azure VM. Here is why that is a real step in Microsoft’s Linux journey, not just a version bump."
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).
You cited three of the most prominent counterexamples to the common meme about Google killing their products as evidence of them extinguishing things. I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, but I don't think you've demonstrated what you think you have.
The “extinguish” part refers to your competition, not to your own product.
You embrace a popular open standard, add new features to your software that build upon the standard (but are proprietary), then watch as your competitors die off because customers become locked into your proprietary features.
Similar to how Apple hijacked SMS to add iMessage and introduced all kinds of features and the blue/green bubble styling.
For the longest time, they refused to support RCS, trying to keep people on iPhone by making texting between iOS and Android suck.
Of course, a lot of people switched to third party messaging apps because of how much Apple was intentionally ruining texting, so now Apple has had to adopt RCS.
So the “extinguish” part can be hard to pull off given sufficiently strong competition.
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.
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.
Same as with any distribution it gives you flexibility over update cadence, validate your software doesn't break with updates, and push out your own hotfixes without being tied to the release process upstream.
Time difference. A VP at Microsoft has someone they can yell at to make an ship a change. Having to ask upstream politely and then wait for their release schedule was proving to be an issue.
all this says is: "MS now provides a unified Linux from WSL to the MS cloud. just like what you got w/ SUSE RH canonical up to now. but without any support outside the MS stack.", right?
or am I missing something?
On-prem hardware support would be interesting, wouldn't it?
Microsoft's Azure Linux (66 points, 4 months ago, 109 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805841
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.
They could of also pulled an Oracle , claimed the APIs are copyrighted and sued.
WINE, even if right couldn't afford to fight.
I can even imagine official Linux support for the Surface tablets.
Infact, Microsoft makes very little off its consumer OS. They could even give up the market entirely and bless a distro with solid WINE support for legacy applications.
Windows stopped being the Golden Goose a long time ago, probably from the point Sundar Pichai 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.
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.
Microsoft could give Windows away for free and be fine. Of course it’s still a lot of money, so they’re not going to leave a multibillion dollar business on the table. But strategically, preserving its revenue is not their priority.
Christ, they even lead with AI slop.
You embrace a popular open standard, add new features to your software that build upon the standard (but are proprietary), then watch as your competitors die off because customers become locked into your proprietary features.
Similar to how Apple hijacked SMS to add iMessage and introduced all kinds of features and the blue/green bubble styling.
For the longest time, they refused to support RCS, trying to keep people on iPhone by making texting between iOS and Android suck.
Of course, a lot of people switched to third party messaging apps because of how much Apple was intentionally ruining texting, so now Apple has had to adopt RCS.
So the “extinguish” part can be hard to pull off given sufficiently strong competition.
[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/linuxandopensourceb...
> 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.
Default configurations as well, since it states FIPS compliance it has to change defaults <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RemoveFipsModeSetup#W...>