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.
Xenix was Microsoft's first operating system, it predates DOS.
Admittedly, Microsoft did not actually write Xenix. They bought a System3 source license from AT&T and used that as a base, Their main service model was to port it to various systems.
Fun Fact: Xenix was the main reason a partition table was included when the PC first got hard disk support.
Note that despite being named here as "Azure Linux" and being described as a "General purpose Linux OS for Azure", once you go to the product documentation it's referred to as "Microsoft Azure Linux Container Host for AKS", and the Quickstart guide is about how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster. It doesn't seem very capable of general use.
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?
Flatcar (that it is based on) is designed to only run containers. So you don’t install any tools via a package manager, you would pull containers to do the work.
You can do one-off configuration by writing scripts to run when the machine first boots, but after that the whole system is immutable except for whatever containers you’ve configured
These are called distroless. The concept is already existing for a while and it's used to ship your application, already packaged or built/transpiled by yourself.
I guess it is good for Microsoft. By using fedora they can use red hats work. If Linux is cancer, then Microsoft is a parasite leeching off the cancer.
> 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.
> MS Linux is released under the provisions of the Gates Private License, which means you can freely use this Software on a single machine without warranty after having paid the purchase price and annual renewal fees.
https://gamesbymason.com/blog/2026/microsoft/
Prediction: Microsoft Is Going To Do The Funniest Thing Imaginable this guy called it loooong back
I remember a reading a similar prediction from several years ago, too, with more or less the same reasons. If I'm able to dig it up, I'll post a link.
It does make complete sense, doesn't it?...
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.
It seems like you could just s/Azure/Amazon/g and get an only slightly different product.
I have 5.25 diskettes of "Microsoft Linux" from the 1990s. I'm reasonably certain that was the first.
Microsoft published its own UNIX from 1980 to 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix?wprov=sfla1
Xenix was Microsoft's first operating system, it predates DOS.
Admittedly, Microsoft did not actually write Xenix. They bought a System3 source license from AT&T and used that as a base, Their main service model was to port it to various systems.
Fun Fact: Xenix was the main reason a partition table was included when the PC first got hard disk support.
They developed something called M-DOS or MIDAS in 1979, but by that time CP/M was already established, so they decided against releasing it.
WSL was the first public sign Microsoft had given up on windows.
I'm surprised that people consider this a victory. It just shows how much open source became irrelevant to users' freedom.
Note that despite being named here as "Azure Linux" and being described as a "General purpose Linux OS for Azure", once you go to the product documentation it's referred to as "Microsoft Azure Linux Container Host for AKS", and the Quickstart guide is about how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster. It doesn't seem very capable of general use.
Don't use this. Don't encourage Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Back in 1998, that would have been a legitimate concern…
Its an MIT licensed repository for something that is GPL licensed, I think you'll be okay.
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?
Flatcar (that it is based on) is designed to only run containers. So you don’t install any tools via a package manager, you would pull containers to do the work.
You can do one-off configuration by writing scripts to run when the machine first boots, but after that the whole system is immutable except for whatever containers you’ve configured
Thanks. I misunderstood that they are talking about Azure container linux and not Azure Linux 4.0 which will use Fedora's package manager.
These are called distroless. The concept is already existing for a while and it's used to ship your application, already packaged or built/transpiled by yourself.
I guess it is good for Microsoft. By using fedora they can use red hats work. If Linux is cancer, then Microsoft is a parasite leeching off the cancer.
> 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.
Shit, I would've gone if I knew it was in MN. Always some other time, I guess
MN is the reason I'm there. It's pretty fun.
Are we at the ‘extend’ stage now?
No. Extinguish. They already introduced SystemD (svchost) and are now "taking care" of the windowing system.
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...
Heh.
> MS Linux is released under the provisions of the Gates Private License, which means you can freely use this Software on a single machine without warranty after having paid the purchase price and annual renewal fees.
It arose as a joke site from /., when and where people still had a sense of humor.
Who cares?