Microsoft’s Azure Linux 4.0 Is Publicly Available, But Still Preview-Only

Source Domain: linuxiac.com

Today, I spent a few hours playing with Microsoft Azure Linux. A sentence that, 20 years ago, would probably have belonged only in a meme. But, as they say, change is the only constant. I say this because Microsoft’s Azure Linux 4.0 is now easier to try because access is no longer limited to Azure Marketplace deployments.

The distro, announced earlier this month as a public preview, is now available not only through Microsoft’s cloud channels but also as downloadable ISO images from the project’s GitHub repository. This means users can install Azure Linux 4.0 in a local virtual machine and test it without deploying via Azure Marketplace or needing enterprise Azure access.

This is an important detail, since the Microsoft Marketplace listing is useful for Azure VM deployments but mainly targets users already in Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem. The GitHub-hosted ISOs make Azure Linux 4.0 accessible to anyone who wants to boot, install, and see what Microsoft’s Linux distribution looks like.

And what it looks like (of course) is not a desktop Linux distro. After installing it locally, the system appears as a minimal, server-style Linux environment. There are no desktop environments, no graphical stack, and no attempt to act like a general-purpose desktop OS.

Additionally, I should also add that the command-line installer still has some rough edges, so it feels rather clunky and unintuitive in places, leaving plenty of room for improvement.

Don’t be misled by the Fedora logo in the screenshot below. It is shown by fastfetch, which I had to compile manually since it is not available in Microsoft’s repositories. The build went very smoothly, but apparently Azure Linux does not yet have its own logo entry in fastfetch, so the tool falls back to displaying Fedora’s current logo instead.

Microsoft Azure Linux 4.0

As for software availability, it is quite limited (as expected) and consists mostly of server-oriented packages. A quick…

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