No it's not. It's for tuned for Azure. Nobody is running this outside of their compute environment.
Of course describing reality in titles would have the inconvenience of causing fewer clicks to these articles.
The title on HN could be updated though.
I think it's misleading and linkbait. The mods would decide what to use instead, this could be "Azure Linux 4.0, Microsoft's Linux distribution for its cloud" or something like this.
> It is minimal on purpose. Azure Linux ships only what cloud and server workloads need. There is no desktop, no GUI, no general-purpose sprawl.
You and Microsoft are using the word "general purpose" to mean different things.
This is not generally compatible with different hardware.
Nor does it include things that could be considered applications, like desktop environments etc. It's not designed to be run by an end user on a desktop.
> Here is a general purpose Linux distribution, give it a try!
Where does your mind go? That this is a server-only distribution meant for a specific provider? Or that it's something like Debian, that could be run on servers and desktops alike without much tinkering, or meant for any provider?
FWIW, Microsoft themselves don't seem to call this a "general purpose Linux distribution", I could probably guess why, what Microsoft themselves say is "Purpose-Built for Azure" which sounds much more accurate. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/linuxandopensourceb...
I think the author might have confused (unintentionally or intentionally, who knows?) "general purpose" with "Purpose-Built for Azure", since Microsoft's own announcements get this right, while submission article is littered with this mistake.
"General purpose" Linux distributions (not "server") typically would include a GUI desktop.
What are some major Linux distributions that are only headless?
What is the market share of those Linux distributions compared to Linux distributions that have a GUI desktop?
I'd agree both could be used in a general-purpose way, but I'd definitively call one of them more general-purpose than the other.
That would likely be a better recommendation than android.
You are being _/
If only the guy who was destined to close a disk operating system deal with IBM hadn’t been goofing around with his plane that fateful day.
We would all be using lisp machines, running smalltalk on microkernels that put the HURD to shame. Just imagine: instead of backslashes and drive letters, we’d have parens. Endless, syntactically-valid parens.
Or CP/M, probably that. But can it run doom?
Where is our PL any kind of bracket and other rococo ornamental symbol is at most totally optional?
Some confuse this with LDS-OS, which makes the user weirdly and unquestionably `nice` by only accepting inputs from protected mode.
Please don't spread lies about Gary.
For others who did not get the joke, Kindall was kind of a big deal:
https://computerhistory.org/blog/fifty-years-of-the-personal...
That future is not different from this future. That road leads down to Javascript and React anyways. (Perhaps with a slightly different syntax.)
It’s not the average joe/jane though.