Fedora: Microsoft is all aboard, but Deepin is dumped

OSes

Red Hat’s free distro loses a desktop, but makes an important new friend

Microsoft has announced a new, Fedora-based Linux distro for Azure VMs,
while Fedora has consigned the Deepin desktop to the bin.

Fedora decided to remove a component maintained outside Red Hat. In the same week, another external company – granted, a slightly better-known one – decided to rebase one of its projects onto Fedora as its upstream distro. It’s the circle of life, or something.

 Fedora 💔Deepin

Seven years after it added the Deepin Desktop Environment in Fedora 30, Tuesday’s FESCo meeting decided to drop Deepin from the distro. The minutes say:

AGREED: Retire all packages maintained by the deepinde-sig
group

The decision comes one year after the project called for a security
review of the Deepin Desktop Environment, after openSUSE dropped the desktop following a negative security assessment. We reported
on that decision at the time. SUSE asked Deepin for feedback, but
didn’t get good enough answers – for which, some months later, the
Chinese project issued
an apology.

Linux Deepin is very much still around: we most recently looked
at version 25 in January, and, back in 2023, the project claimed it had
passed
three million installs of its paid Tongxin UOS desktop edition. It’s a very pretty Windows-like desktop
environment, but it never made it to having its own Fedora spin – and it
certainly won’t now.

Microsoft ❤️ Fedora

But as one door closes, another opens. Fedora is still winning new
friends and allies, and mere days earlier, there was a surprise
announcement at the Open Source Summit North America, which as we write
is winding down. On Monday, Microsoft announced
a new version of its in-house Linux distro, Azure Linux 4, along
with a companion distro called Azure Container Linux.

There have been products called Azure Linux for quite a while. It’s
based on the much more minimal CBL-Mariner distro, which we
tried in 2022. The Register reported
on Azure Linux becoming generally available in 2023, and then on the
release of version
3 in 2024. We also knew back then that the company was working on
turning it into a more general-purpose server OS: we reported on it migrating
LinkedIn to Azure Linux in place of CentOS Linux that same year.

There isn’t very much information about Azure Linux 4 yet; the broader rollout will be at the Microsoft Build
conference next month. For now, all you can do is fill in a form to register your interest.
However, the announcement reveals that version 4 switches to Fedora as
its upstream distro. It was already based on the RPM packaging tools,
hinting at some Red Hat or SUSE heritage in there somewhere.

There’s slightly more information about Azure Container Linux. This
is a separate distro, an immutable host OS for running containers. The
announcement says “Azure Container Linux is based on the Flatcar
project.”

Flatcar is the continuation of CoreOS Container Linux, which The
Reg has covered since it
released its first version in 2014. As Linux Weekly News reported that year, CoreOS
was based on Google’s ChromeOS, but redesigned to host containers.

Red Hat acquired
CoreOS in 2018, and then two years later, discontinued
Container Linux. It replaced the Google and Gentoo-based distro with
a new one based on Red Hat’s own immutable tool chain, called Fedora CoreOS.

German FOSS consultancy Kinvolk forked the CoreOS code and continued
development under the name of Flatcar
Container Linux. Kinvolk was acquired
by Microsoft in 2021, but continued to work on Flatcar.

Now it seems that, with the announcement of Azure Linux 4 as well as
Azure Container Linux, Microsoft has two separate in-house distros: one
based on Fedora, and one based on ChromeOS. For now, Flatcar is still
trundling along the tracks just fine, but we suspect some future
consolidation may be coming down the line. ®