Over the more than a decade that I’ve been hosting Coder Radio, there’s been an evolving story about Microsoft’s relationship with Linux. It’s been a trend of at first resistance (think the Balmer era) and now full on embrace. Can it be? Well, if you followed Build this year, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with any conclusion other than Microsoft has fully fallen in love with Tux. This is by no means going to be an exhaustive look at build, but rather just a focus on the Linux oriented announcements. Let’s try try to figure out what is going on here.
Windows is natively integrating Linux-like command-line utilities built on uutils, the open-source Rust (yes, rejoice crab people) port of GNU Coreutils. For those of us bouncing between System76 Linux boxes, macOS, WSL, and cloud shells all day, the mental tax of context switching is about to drop significantly because your standard commands will finally just work natively on Windows. I also think this will be useful for folks who mostly work on Windows but occasionally have to jump to a *nix type system to become more familiar with the standard command-line interface.
Microsoft is officially baking a native way to create and run Linux containers directly into Windows. The pragmatic pitch here is a new wslc.exe CLI and a dedicated API that lets native Windows apps spin up Linux containers for local AI workloads, testing pipelines, and heavy processing, with a public preview dropping in the coming months. They are basically dragging the entire Linux and container dev loop directly into the Windows ecosystem. The killer feature here is going to be that this also allows the enterprise management tools and policies that many enterprise IT admins swear by. This is probably only going to appeal to devs who already are proficient in working on Windows (in the enterprise that’s a lot) and are interested in trying out some of this new-fangled Linux Ai stuff or maybe just have strict IT management policies.
My personal favorite announcement though admittedly not purely Linux related is Azure HorizonDB. Azure HorizonDB is a managed PostgreSQL service in preview aimed at “agentic” applications, with built-in vector indexing, semantic search, in-database access to AI models, and integrations with Fabric, Foundry, and GitHub Copilot in VS Code. The hook is simple: Microsoft knows developers already like Postgres, so it is trying to make Postgres the default database layer for AI apps rather than forcing a brand-new data stack. TLDR on this one – if you’re doing “AI” (and a few other data-intensive things), they want you on Azure.
Back to the pure Linux stuff, we have Azure Linux 4 going into preview. Azure Linux is Microsoft’s open-source, Azure-focused Linux distribution for VMs, containers, and Kubernetes. The 4.0 preview is explicitly for evaluation/testing, not production, and brings a newer 6.18 LTS kernel, dnf5, updated glibc/OpenSSL/systemd/Python, and a Fedora/RPM-style foundation. One presumes that this will be a highly optimized distro on Azure and (my hope) have some sort of pricing advantage.
That’s a lot of Linux for a Microsoft event and I didn’t even mention all of it. There seems to be one message that Microsoft is trying to get through loud and clear: “Windows is the premium one-stop-shop for developers of all stripes”. I don’t know if that’s really going ring true to everyone; for instance, those of us with years of experience on macOS and desktop Linux are unlikely to make such a large transition. However, for the day to day Windows user, it’s never looked better and the Azure and DB side of things is going to be a huge improvement for those of us shipping Linux-powered workloads on our clients’ Azure tenants. Let me know what you think on Coder Radio or LinkedIn. Also, if your higher-ups are demanding that you bring “AI” into your workflows but you have tons of legacy data and processes, take a look at this; Hell, you can even just forward it to them and have them take the quiz.
