Much water has flowed under the bridge since Steve Ballmer compared Linux to a cancer. Today, the Redmond giant offers tools like Windows Subsystem for Linux, multiplies its open source software projects, and has owned GitHub since 2018. What's missing from the list? Its very own Linux distro! The official name is CBL-Mariner, designed for cloud infrastructure, and you can download a copy... as long as you're willing to create the ISO image manually.
Microsoft is developing projects based on Linux. Twenty years ago, anyone saying that would have been advised to take one or two medications. Today... it's the plain truth. Even Linus Torvalds himself has stopped seeing Microsoft as a threat, beyond a certain tension that will never disappear. Everyone recognizes that Microsoft's interest in Linux is directly linked to Azure and the cloud in general. And the most recent proof of that is... nothing less than a distro. Welcome to CBL-Mariner.
CBL-Mariner: Microsoft's Linux Distribution
Microsoft describes CBL-Mariner as an “internal Linux distro” for its cloud infrastructure and other cutting-edge products and services. As its name indicates (CBL stands for Common Base Linux), the distro was prepared to offer a stable and consistent platform to all those devices and services, prioritizing a compact core of packages that address “universal needs” without sacrificing flexibility. That means any developer or team of developers can add additional packages and produce images for their workloads without difficulty.
Long story short: it's not a Linux distro for the desktop. Yes, you can create an ISO image and install it on the hardware or virtual environment you want (this article will help you with that), but don't expect something like Ubuntu or Mint. It's a small distro with two installation modes (Core and Full), and it depends on RPM packages, using Tiny DNF as package manager. There are two repositories configured by default, with 3,300 packages available between both.
The development of CBL-Mariner is based on the work of other high-profile open projects such as Photon OS, Fedora, OpenMamba, and Linux from Scratch. And from here... who knows? While the CBL-Mariner distro seems ready to meet Microsoft's needs, I imagine someone out there will start experimenting with its code, perhaps adding a graphical interface or sharing ready-to-use ISOs. We'll leave the radar on just in case...
Official GitHub profile: Click here
