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!
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).
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.
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.
Don't forget the part where blades will often be different from what's described in the docs, because Microsoft loves changing/renaming shit for no reason.
I do have to give them credit. The cli is pretty good. And Azure Storage Explorer is probably the best Microsoft app I’ve ever used. So props to the team who made that.
Just doesn’t match my experience at all. AWS isnsuper complex but stuff works. GCP has clearly the nicest interface but not every feature that AWS has. Azure is complex, slow, hard to use and incredibly opaque. No way I’ll use it again out of my own free will.
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.
You have a core team member of the Azure Linux group invite you to ask/tell them what you want to see in what they are working on and this is what you choose to say? Smh
They referred to Microsoft’s known practice of embrace, extend, extinguish a “conspiracy theory” in a sibling thread, so they’ve essentially lost credibility. I don’t think genuine feedback is going anywhere useful.
“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.
It might be when used now, but it was used by Microsoft internally at the time.
First part of that Wikipedia page:
> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
The MS of today is actively reaping the benefits of the EEE & openly shady business years.
That can be framed as an intentional reformation, but also as exhausting high-value targets, losing monopolies, and settling into profitable equilibrium out of necessity.
Modern competitors to MS are effectively immune to MS-EEE, in some cases by being way better at every aspect of it (MS IE is now delivered by Google based on forked Apple tech, and Office uses React, for quick examples…). MS pivoted to Azure-entanglements for their entrenched customers, which remains highly profitable, but have also had a marked decrease in engineering clout in certain key areas and still have a fragmented client/GUI ecosystem.
I’d contend they haven’t changed, they’re just cornered in ways they never were before so we see different behaviour. If MS controlled iOS or Facebook or WebKit or Search we’d see more classic plays reminding us who owns what.
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?
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.
It's super weird people are bitter about things that happened almost two decades ago. Much less there was no war. I think Ballmer said some mean words about Linux and Microsoft sued Lindows for infringement and won. After the rename to Linspire Microsoft actually worked with them on compatibility. The whole Windows v Linux "war" is completely contrived by some fans of Linux as some holy war.
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.
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.
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...
after what has happened with consumer products, how can anybody be sure its not going to happen on the server side?
pretend your a manager, and you have to approach an employee about thier hygiene.
Not meant to replace windows 11 as others are suggesting
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...
There was a project to add Hyper-V like capabilities to Azure Linux fork, but they went silent after the announcement.
First part of that Wikipedia page:
> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
That can be framed as an intentional reformation, but also as exhausting high-value targets, losing monopolies, and settling into profitable equilibrium out of necessity.
Modern competitors to MS are effectively immune to MS-EEE, in some cases by being way better at every aspect of it (MS IE is now delivered by Google based on forked Apple tech, and Office uses React, for quick examples…). MS pivoted to Azure-entanglements for their entrenched customers, which remains highly profitable, but have also had a marked decrease in engineering clout in certain key areas and still have a fragmented client/GUI ecosystem.
I’d contend they haven’t changed, they’re just cornered in ways they never were before so we see different behaviour. If MS controlled iOS or Facebook or WebKit or Search we’d see more classic plays reminding us who owns what.
This has been true from day 1.
As you saw the repo has been around for quite some time.
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...
That is interesting, when I think Azure, I just think "AWS" but in different regions and a clunky / overthought UI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Linux
Heres a hasty link to an article about it https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/microsoft_offered_to_u...
Amazon wasn’t even a twinkle in its father’s eye.