[hparadiz]

Both of those things are true in different ways.

Purpose built for azure probably means integration with azure meta data APIs and kernel specific tweaks for the hardware.

It could also be general purpose for what you can run on it.

Basically it's a curated distro. Not complicated or anything different from what AWS and GCE are doing.

[embedding-shape]

> It could also be general purpose for what you can run on it.

Yeah of course, it's a Linux distribution. But feels like a marketing push when multiple people suddenly go "oh yeah Microsoft building a general purpose Linux distribution" when that's not what's happening. So what if it isn't general purpose and built purposefully for Azure? It doesn't remove anything, just being more accurate with how it's being marketed.

[hparadiz]

When you create a VM on these cloud platforms the categories are like "general purpose, high memory, high cpu, high gpu" and there's various types of VMs to select from. They are simply using the terminology that DevOps folks use when discussing instance types. General purpose just means it's not tuned to favor anything in particular. Don't overthink it. You are not the audience.

[embedding-shape]

> General purpose just means it's not tuned to favor anything in particular

Agreed, that's why it doesn't make sense to call this "general purpose", since it's specifically tuned in favor of Azure:

> Azure Linux was built with that principle in mind: a single, Microsoft-supported Linux foundation designed to work across every Azure compute surface [...] with a predictable update cadence designed around Azure infrastructure

It's quite literally tuned for Azure and Microsoft...

[derefr]

I think the GP used the word "tuned" incorrectly / to make the wrong point here.

A general-purpose OS is one to which you can build a stack on top of it for any use-case you can think of, and it will cope with whatever stack you lay on it about equally well, because it hasn't been forced into a particular shape where it's much better at some things but much worse at other things. A "jack of all trades, master of none" OS.

Microsoft would call all consumer and server editions of Windows "general-purpose OSes." But Windows Datacenter Edition and Windows IoT Core would be non-general-purpose OSes — the former only exists to run hypervisors/SANs, and it doesn't support "stripping off" that layer, so if you used it for anything else, that layer would always be there, bloating things up; and the latter only exists to run on embedded devices, and it doesn't support "adding back" the extra frameworks and services regular Windows has, that would be required to use it for "more" than embedded use-cases.

An OS being "tuned" for a particular substrate (what the OS is good at running on), meanwhile, has nothing to do with the OS's use-case (what can be run well on the OS.)

An analogy: each mobile OEM's spin of Android only works on that OEM's own phones, because that OEM's phones have the required hardware wired to the right SoC pins, and the Android spin ships with a BSP that defines a device tree that matches that expected wiring. Thus, those OEM Android spins are "tuned for" those phones.

But in the end, they're all just Android phones, and they can all do the same things. All of these Android spins are "general-purpose OSes." They're all made to enable you to put any Android software you like on top of them, and run it just fine. (Contrast Android spins made by industrial vendors specifically for automotive or kiosk use-cases, where a given car company or kiosk manufacturer then produces a hardware-customized-and-tuned spin of that already-appliance-purposed spin. You wouldn't use a car-infotainment Android upstream for other use-cases; you'd have to undo all the car-infotainment stuff.)

Azure Linux is exactly like a phone-OEM "tuning" of Android (and unlike a vertical-specific Android spin.) Azure Linux is also like, for another example, the vendor-specific Linux "distros" [really, tunings] that ship as (usually binary-only) images for various Single-Board Computers.

In all three cases, a "tuned" fork of an OS is still intended to run anything a user might want to run on the platform the "tuned" fork was forked off of. It exposes a general-purpose surface to the developer — just one that happens to do some of the general-purpose things you ask it to do, more performantly than a non-"tuned" OS would on the same hardware/substrate.

And, in all three cases, the "tuned" fork accomplishes that by relying on device-specific knowledge and capabilities (i.e. drivers, device-tree entries, kernel patches, etc) that have been burned into the "tuned" fork rather than upstreamed. There's still a HAL between you and that stuff; your workload doesn't need to know the "tuned" fork has been tuned. It just benefits automatically, from the OS having a deeper understanding of the hardware/substrate.

[derefr]

> Yeah of course, it's a Linux distribution.

That is not a given. There are Linux distributions that run anywhere but are not general-purpose. For example, the various "immutable" Linux distros that exist solely to be used as Kubernetes nodes to host containers.

[yndoendo]

Your statement is contradicting with stating it was Purposely built for Azure.

Someone would have to make a Ubuntu equivalent and use Azure Linux as the base to turn it into a general purpose Linux OS.

Personally, I don't trust Microsoft and their Linux distro with how they Enshitified Windows OS and all of their other software products. Add in the fact that Microsoft likes to multi-count CVEs, per distro, instead of the actual flaw to try and make Windows OS look better when it comes to security.

Microsoft is a bad actor.