Microsoft has made Azure Linux generally available. Repeat, Azure Linux After using Azure Linux internally for two years and running it in public preview since October 2022, Microsoft this week finally made its distribution generally available. Azure Linux is an open-source container host OS for the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) that is optimized for Azure and aimed at making it easier for …
"2001.. linux is cancer"
1. scientists predicted i guess late 1800s that cars will never be able run faster than apprx 150km/hr
2. according to US regulations.. a phone slimmer than 7mm is not a phone.
linux is still a cancer.. windows or rdbms/oracle/sqlserver/etc: join/mount using this keyword.. . linux: create this output conf file, create input conf on other end, put this keyword in conf on both ends.. then fuckin restart the service! wao!
and is still warranted today (sadly). The MS Leopard can not change its spots.
NIH rules inside MS. I would not put it past MS to change the ABI to be more like Windows and not Linux. After all MS is all about Windows isn't it?
AND we (as in IT pro's) have predicted that W12 will be a W11 skin over a Linux kernel for quite a while.
After all MS is all about Windows isn't it?
No, not any more. That much is obvious.
Desktop is still about Windows. For now. In Microsoft's world the future of desktop is dumb clients and Web apps (Office apps, Teams, ...). But they are not there yet.
But server - nah. Servers are all about Azure. With Linux kernels. And containers for the services.
I love people keeping an open mind. I was a dyed-in-the-wool Unix techie for 25 years until I had no choice but to work with MS offerings. Sure, far from perfect and with their track record and general attitude they're still not to be trusted 100% but they have made huge strides in trying to do some very neat side projects.
They're a business, not a charity. MS will never be the FSF, everyone needs to simply accept that MS is a generally nasty mega-corp but that doesn't mean that there aren't good people on the inside of MS trying to good things that people can use and have fun.
In a word, grow up and get into the real world.
( For the record, I'm not a whipper-snapper, I'm 52 and have been working with computers since I was a kid in 1979. I still have my original Yggdrasil CD media and book from 1993 and I still have a set of ICL System 25 manuals and my MVS training notes from 1991. I have the chops as a veteran! )
Who would have believed 20 years ago that Microsoft would in 2023 be releasing a open source Linux distro? But it only take a little scratch of the service to see MS of old still at work with the way they are trying to push Edge on everyone by keep reverting it back to the default browser through Windows updates, or requiring it to be able to use the chat feature on Bing.
> Who would have believed 20 years ago that Microsoft would in 2023 be releasing a open source Linux distro?
Anyone who's used a Windows server after exposure to any sort of unix, although I wasn't expecting it so soon.
Unless Ballmer's a complete idiot plans were already in place then. Nobody knows better than Microsoft that you can't compete with free.
@ChoHag
Quote: "Nobody knows better than Microsoft that you can't compete with free."
This quote needs a little nuance........
(1) "free": every time I bought an x86 PC there was $100 of the price I paid which went straight to Redmond, a "fee" for M$ supplying Windows
(2) "free": ...but I never OWNED the software, only licenced it from M$ (read the EULA)
No....Windows only appeared to be "free" to anyone who was unconcerned about the makeup of the cost of a PC!!
(3) The fun started when the unwary user needed M$ Office, or Norton Utilities......quite a long way from "free"....
(4) .....and that's before another year passed and the "upgrades" also proved to be a long way from "free".
Perhaps we need a better definition of the word "free":
free, adj. usually a synonym for "pre-paid"
There.......fixed that for you!!
The thing is there is no way MS are creating their hosted/PaaS offerings such as O365, Exchange online, Azure Domain Controllers with their fundamental in-house core technologies.
Exchange online and Azure AD managed by a global topology of JetDB instances and Domain Controllers? Nah, probably just postfix, Exim, postgres, OpenLDAP, BIND (etc and/or whatever) *heavily* optimised and bent into shape. Which is no mean feat and no slight on MS engineering meant by that at all, just let's be real here, Microsoft's primary revenue streams in the present day would not exist if it weren't for Linux and the open-source platform.
I found this statement very telling:
” Microsoft started CBL-Mariner because it needed an internal Linux distro and a consistent platform for the myriad workloads engineers were running on Azure, according to Jim Perrin, principal program manager for Microsoft Azure Linux.”
It would seem MS’s own engineers prefer developing on and for platforms other than Windows…
Ridiculous.
There is a report buried in the internet's history of Microsoft's attempt to convert hotmail to exchange after they bought it. I can't find it because search engines are appalling.
The TLDR is that the Windows ecosystem was (is?) made of toys compared to the real tools unix has, but they did it anyway (and suggested a bunch of improvements which amounted to turning windows into unix --- we got PowerShell).
Could you imagine the fallout if it became apparent that Microsoft don't trust the shit they're selling? If they were hosting on postfix, they'd be selling postfix. And postfix would suck.
> Could you imagine the fallout if it became apparent that Microsoft don't trust the shit they're selling?
Different times…
I remember Sun Microsystems had an IBM for its accounting and HR systems… don’t know if they had managed to migrate away to Sun hardware etc. before Oracle acquired them.
Accounting systems are notoriously hard to replace. The failure rate for replacement projects is high. The problem is so much of how a business operates is encoded in its accounting and payroll systems.
I worked for a university in the early 2000s that was still using an IBM 360-series for payroll. They finally managed to replace it with a modern software package (Oracle PeopleSoft, I think?) shortly before I left, but there were a couple payroll cycles during the transition that were really touch-and-go.
Could you imagine the fallout if it became apparent that Microsoft don't trust the shit they're selling?
If I recall correctly they had to rapidly hide the fact that they were producing their Windows CDs with or on Unix based systems at some point. It's been a while, but I recall them getting away with that too.
People have short memories.
Moving to Linux, whether hidden or openly like this, is their only option. The legacy windows codebase is so unmaintainable they attempt a full rewrite every other year and fail to revamp more than a few sub components each time. I put 70% odds Windows 13 will be running on Linux under the hood. If they do then whether they'll admit it I'd put 30% odds!
I tried the Linux subsystem and found it a hacked up broken mess. I don’t really “get” Linux to be sure, I find it fragile and finicky at the best of times. For example my PS3 “may or may not” suffer some kind of crash when activating “HEN,” the homebrew enabler, which in turn requires a “hard” shutdown, followed by an exhaustive and time-wasting disk assessment. In fact Linux fundamentally sucks in that it produces this extraordinarily verbose dialog of self-conversation that flashes past at each and every bootup, before vanishing to show a login prompt. What in the Royal Hell is all that garbage? I find, if I try to catch a glimpse of what’s flashing by about 1/4 appears to be in some kind of error condition. Is there anything to pay attention to there, well presumably because it all goes whipping past, and presumably not, since it’s all cleared away before you can see it.
But the frustrating nature of the Linux CLI is you carefully construct each command to issue to the software, and if there’s the slightest typo it fails with the most pathologically useless error message describing what went wrong. Entire batch jobs are one bit-error from massive pile-ups. But I digress.
Running Linux subsystem simply so you can run RPM seems crazy to me. Packages, containers, really?
Because I run Windows itself as a virtual environment — not the other way around. As far as I’m concerned Windows is merely an environment for running a desktop application. Though I may use it to “run” a primitive emulator for a long obsolete system (nostalgia purposes only).
If I want to open up a Mac environment or a Linux environment then they get their own, separate and distinct, sets of resources. Also, they, too, are only good for running some other, different, desktop applications.
And that’s all it is.
As it happens PSA3 was designed to run Linux.
For a while. Then Sony decided that people didn't want to be able to use Linux on their console so in 2016 they sent out an "update" which permanently disabled that facility.
There are work-arounds out there but to be honest too much time has passed and I have lost the urge to tinker with my systems.
Yes, old age and laziness have struck!
Yes, that's what got Sony banned in my house.
If I buy a car with alloys, I don't appreciate the manufacturer inviting themselves into my home and swap it out with steel rims post sale.
I bought the console exactly because it also ran Linux, and then they decided to remove it because some f*ckwiths used it to hack games. And no, the trade description act apparently didn't apply. So, that was the last Sony product I ever bought.
> “In fact Linux fundamentally sucks in that it produces this extraordinarily verbose dialog of self-conversation that flashes past at each and every bootup, before vanishing to show a login prompt.”
Every version of Windows does that as well, just that most people and systems default to having verbose mode disabled.
>” But the frustrating nature of the Linux CLI is you carefully construct each command to issue to the software, and if there’s the slightest typo it fails with the most pathologically useless error message describing what went wrong. Entire batch jobs are one bit-error from massive pile-ups”
You need to be a precise typist for any command line interface. Yes, Unix due to its ultra terse CLI and minimal error reporting, can be challenging, but that was one of the intentions behind its design…
Just like windows then...?
Honestly, when I create a shell script, I test the hell out of it before even thinking of setting up anything more than a template cron job.
You log the process of the job so you can debug the inevitable foopahs.
This applies to any batch job be it on Z/OS, VMS, Windows, Unix or Linux.
That's the default "drop out " you're getting. Powershell is a scritped version of .Net framework, it is not a bash shell with it's own *nix utils! I'm a linux golang/rust dev but even I know that Powershell being built on .Net framework is handing you a object with all the error details then dumping a default output, it's your job to take out the elements you actually want and throw the rest away if you don't want them. Heck you can even switch off all the error handling if you like and go blind and just pray shit works! Like most langs it's your job to learn to code what you want out of something, handle the unexpected in a suitable manner and move on, Powershell is not bash, yes it has vars and it can run bins but that's where it ends, the rest is scripting!
I couldn't really care less about what you use, but surely you're not really so ignorant as to think that Linux boot messages aren't available afterwards?
Also, computers require precise commands which are entirely correct in order to produce the correct output. This is not exactly ground-breaking revelation, it's a fundamental of computing. Come to think of it, it's a fundamental of the universe. Sure, my shell can offer corrections to things it thinks I may have typed incorrectly but most of the time it's wrong - I'll stick with the error messages thanks.
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