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. ®