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bchewyme
damn when did this come out?
shevy-java
Even Microsoft is betting on Linux now. No wonder given Win11 not being popular! :D
unixhero
This is the most absurd news I have read in a while. I for one welcome our new open source overlords.
binsquare
Nothing new,this is meant for their cloud Linux boxes.

Not meant to replace windows 11 as others are suggesting

Sytten
Not even at gunpoint would I choose Azure as my cloud provider but great for Linux
natas
qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom AzureLinux-3.0-x86_64.iso -boot d -m 2048
jaboutboul
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!
superb_dev
Is Azure running its hypervisors on Linux these days? I read awhile back that they were switching from Windows
rolph
even microsoft knows better than to use windows for infrastructure.
Datagenerator
Where is the downvote button? Remember: it's EEE all the way.
bandrami
Wasn't part of one of the big lawsuits 30 years ago that Microsoft could not market a UNIX derivative?
ajcp
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).
jaboutboul
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.
klipklop
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.
deafpolygon
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?
jaboutboul
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.
knbknb
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?