Microsoft Rebranding CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution To "Azure Linux"

Finally. I was always wondering why they didn't name it Azure Linux in the first place.

If there is one thing Microsoft is struggling with it's naming things. I work mostly with .NET and the regular renaming of products is just something you have to put up with. 🤷
- This is so true. We can see it with their Xbox game consoles as well: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X. I'm genuinely curious to see what comes next. Windows also was not very consistent in their naming: 3.11 (version numbering), 95 (suddenly year based), 98, 2000, Me (suddenly abbreviations or words based), XP, Vista, 7 (suddenly number based), 8, 10 (suddenly leaving out number 9), 11, 12. What a roller coaster.
  And that's only speaking about two line of products...
- More like .NOT amirie guise
Because Microsoft is terrible at naming things. Just look at ~~Azure AD~~ EntraAD
- Windows Intune -> Microsoft Intune -> Microsoft Endpoint Manager -> Microsoft Intune
  Then have a look in all defender plans and renamings... Holy shitballs
- Also ~~Yammer~~ Viva Engage

What are the positive qualities of Microsoft Linux? I’m sure it is more stable than normal Windows, but I’m not sure I could ever trust it as an OS.

Ironically, telemetry information, and it's a slim host os. At least from a corpo-tech perspective. It's nicely integrated into azures dashboards, logs and monitoring tools that kind of thing
Its for their cloud instances. Just like you wouldn't actually run Amazon Linux. If you're using their cloud platform it's absolutely the best option, but in all other scenarios you wouldn't think to touch it
- I don’t think it’s comparable to Amazon Linux even, it’s more infrastructure oriented. From the Wikipedia page:
  CBL-Mariner is being developed by the Linux Systems Group at Microsoft for its edge network services and as part of its cloud infrastructure.[5] The company uses it as the base Linux for containers in the Azure Stack HCI implementation of Azure Kubernetes Service
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBL-Mariner

Cool. I will still not be using it.

you're not supposed to anyway. it's used for internal azure infrastructure
- I won’t be using Azure either though, so not even tangentially.

I appreciate that they made the name easier for people to know to avoid lol

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes had been known as CBL-Mariner for "Common Base Linux" while now it appears to be in the process of transitioning to Azure Linux.

Not to be confused with Microsoft's Azure Sphere Linux-based OS as a platform for IoT/microcontroller use, Azure Linux is evolving out of CBL-Mariner.

With releasing today CBL-Mariner 2.0.20240301, it's now redirecting to the project Microsoft/AzureLinux on GitHub.

The CBL-Mariner repository has been renamed to "AzureLinux" and other references to CBL-Mariner have been transitioned to Azure Linux branding as well while some CBL-Mariner marks remain.

Within the new v2.0.20240301 release are also some source updates beginning to rename artifacts such as going from "MARINER_VERSION" to "AZL_VERSION" for Azure Linux.

It will be interesting to find out the motivation for this apparent re-branding / evolution of CBL-Mariner now to Azure Linux and if Microsoft will be better positioning their in-house Linux platform publicly or what other changes may be coming down the pipe for Azure Linux.

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- Yeah, that's funny.
  I considered opening an issue, having assumed that this was a bug and in such cases the bot might as well not comment at all, but apparently part of its intended purpose is saving people from having to open articles.
  Not sure how I feel about that, to be honest.
- Means the article is compact. Atleast thats what i like to belive