Azure Linux 4.0 is a Microsoft-developed, Fedora-derived general-purpose Linux distribution that is currently in public preview for Azure Virtual Machines, expanding beyond its origins as a container-focused system:
After reading this article (unfortunately in German, so it might be a bit difficult for you), I’m leaning toward being skeptical of Azure Linux.
Even before reading the article, it was clear to me that Microsoft isn’t giving anything away for free and naturally wants to make money. However, Microsoft might be trying to strengthen its position in ways that could be detrimental to the Linux community.
We’ll see.
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True. GitHub started off positive when Microsoft took them over. But then over time, they have not been as many positives.
Can we trust Microsoft? Can we trust big corps? I mean look at what Red Hat did to CentOS. 
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Exactly. Big companies buy up other companies and technologies just to get rid of them and fill the space with their own junk.
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azure linux, fedora with custom kernel !
what kind of afford microsoft puts into azure linux ?
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one dev with OpenClaw 
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Fair points all around, these companies bad track records speak for themselves. But I think it’s worth resisting the instinct to write off everything they touch, because by that standard we’d have to be just as suspicious of Red Hat after CentOS, and we still use RHEL-derived stuff every day. 
Oracle and MySQL, or Microsoft with WSL (and especially WSL2) is a better example: they put real Linux tooling in front of millions of Windows users, a lot of whom ended up dual booting or switching over, and they’ve been genuinely useful for a ton of people over the years.
Azure Linux, being Fedora-derived and open on GitHub means we can actually watch what they do with it rather than guess, with caution of course! It doesn’t mean we trust blindly, just that we keep our eyes open and take the useful parts where they exist. 
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I’d like to remind Lotus Notes/Domino history. Notes/Domino is probably the best software platform I have ever seen and worked with. The following page nicely summarises the story:
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