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.
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.
Thanks, sorry for my tone yesterday. It was the end of a long frustrating work day.
Azure Linux does look interesting, thank you for working on it. Fedora is a great choice as a base image. Having a Fedora based distro designed to work well with WSL would be amazing! As a base image for apps though I'm curious how you manage the 6month release cycle. Are you planning on expended support, or would people using it need to upgrade every 6 months. I think the appeal of a Debian base is we only need to think about big upgrades every 2 years.
A few bits of Azure feedback I can think of now. Probably not directly related to what you work on, but just some of my experiences working with Azure for the last year.
1. The CLI is good, I think maintaining feature parity between the CLI and portal is really helpful and allows us to integrate with our internal infra more easily. Azure CLI is really the best part working with the service.
2. The management portal is really flaky. Like unknown error messages pop up when clicking on deployment logs. Sometimes the SSH or log tail functions just don't load at all and overall the experience just feels sluggish. I'm really not sure what can be done about this but I've been moving to the CLI just because the web interface is frustrating to work with.
3. The Microsoft documentation is really verbose and difficult to navigate in my opinion. Like we were looking in to hosting a Teams bot and those docs are full of emoji and full page articles like 'why did we make an SDK?'. I have to jump around several pages to get to what I need and even then the code examples in the docs are not actually in sync with the current version of the SDK library. It feels like AI was just set loose to write as much as possible. I think the problem is the information density of much of the documentation is very low. Maybe that's something that can be addressed going forward.
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.
Their behavioural changes 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.
i'm speaking on behalf of myself. While yes, this was true back in then day, that is very much not the philosophy nowadays. it's a different company with different leadership than those days.
Speaking as an ex-MSFT employee who was there during the "new leadership" transition, the new leadership is not any less sociopathic than the old one. I'll give you that Satya is more charismatic so he can hide it better than Ballmer, but that only makes it worse.
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.
When I said "we" I meant the group of folks who work on and care about Linux and open source at Microsoft and in a position to help affect change that comes in via feedback from the community.
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.
But it's true. Microsoft's reputation is in the toilet. After everything from the ICC sanctions to the AI spam in Windows to this month's Patch Tuesday incident, everyone knows to avoid Microsoft products like their life depends on it.
But if you want an actionable idea here's one: make it a hundred times cheaper, or free. People use Oracle Cloud because it's free, even though Oracle is even worse than Microsoft. If you want people to use it, you know what to do.
> Another thing you may have noticed is that the taskmgr or even regedit does not look the same as you would see on Windows 11. This is because as I mentioned, Cloud Host is built on OneCore and it is headless (or console based), hence, it doesn’t contain any of the GUI pieces of Windows. We have a special taskmgr and regedit version that doesn’t link with all the modern GUI functionality available in Windows 11, which gives them the “old style” look.
I haven't used Windows in a long time, so it looked normal to me. I just went and watched a video on Windows 11, goodness me.
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.
My experience over the years with a few Linux distributions is that rpm based distros always seem to give me more problems with dependencies and always seems harder to fix. These days I much prefer deb based distributions, mainly Ubuntu as I like their trade-off between stability and newer versions though I'm not a fan of snap packages.
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