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Comment by VWWHFSfQ | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft will acquire Canonical at some point. Ubuntu is already powering a majority of Azure cloud. I thought they would go for Red Hat as they already had a huge presence in enterprise, but IBM beat them to it. Canonical is next up.

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Doubtful at this point. We have Mariner/CBL and are committed heavily to it. Has its own development and kernel teams etc. and is being pushed internally to be the Linux all 1P systems run on for supply chain reasons.

Microsoft themselves may be committed to their own distro, but their customers are overwhelmingly committed to Ubuntu as it's powering the majority of client workloads on Azure.

Microsoft also offers another server distro, though they are moving to externa providers for support (Flatcar)

It's amazing that 25 years from the halloween documents, and 20 years on from http://mslinux.org/, that's the case.

Also amazing how much of mslinux.org is true

Internet Integration -- well yes every machine has an ip stack

More Swap Space -- apparently swap is a good thing for performance

new type-ahead command-line features -- sounds a little like copilot

Graphical Point-And-Click RPM Management -- certainly what desktop linux has

Plug-and-Play For Linux devices which make adding and removing peripherals a snap -- well yes, things like udev

crapd -- insert pottering based commentary

The space vehicle will be running our newest product, SpacePod 2004 -- in reality it's linux that tends to run on mars

Microsoft is working to incorporate the well known "Start" button from the Windows Platform into X Windows' Gnome interface -- I believe Start has been removed from Windows now? I have something very similar in the top corner of my xfce screen though

This will change quickly. Microsoft shops often go with whatever Microsoft is touting eventually. The .NET ecosystem is very much like this.

So yea, I don't see any future where Microsoft buys Canonical vs just slowly migrating customers onto Mariner.

Would make sense - Ubuntu, much like Windows and other MS products, has fallen very far from grace. All MS has to do is remove a bunch of settings and preinstall edge.

What advantage will that give MS? Genuine question, as the code is all open source. What's the advantage of having the corporate entity?

As another commenter mentioned, MS' customers are running Ubuntu on Azure en masse. So it's mostly a risk mitigation and "owning the platform end-to-end".

Maybe it's because I don't know the field, but I don't see a he risk yet. I mean does AWS own its own OS? It's a standard OS, what can go wrong?

Yeah they have Amazon Linux which is their own fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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