My Friday thinking...

Friday Thinking time…

Be assured, I will not all Fridays abuse of your time 😊.

But this seemed me too interesting not to write about it.

Its CBL-Mariner, no it’s not about a boat in a Marina.

It’s the free open-source OS from Microsoft based on Linux.

Yes from Microsoft.

This light Linux based OS has no GUI and is mainly seen as a server OS. It can be downloaded from GitHub together with around 3000 packages in an RPM type format.

This Linux is the same OS as it runs in Azure for Kubernetes and HCI containers from Microsoft and used to run Linux apps in Windows.

Download CBL-Mariner to an existing Linux environment and create an ISO file to deploy it.

It took not more than half an hour to download, understand, create the ISO, and build the VM under QEMU-KVM. I tried it on Ubuntu and Synology VMM. Due to the small footprint, it runs fast and can be seen as a small container, or you directly create a Docker container with CBL-Mariner.

Documentation exists for the project in GitHub explaining the bits and bytes of the idea to create a Linux based OS.

And what can be find searching through the Internet, that it is part of the Windows 365 starting 2 of august 2021.

That’s the technical part, now I am wondering and thinking where all this will bring us in regard of Windows and Microsoft?

If Windows apps will run under a light Linux, do we still need a heavy Windows, based still on parts of the early days of Windows NT with Lanman.

Running computers is costly. If Microsoft can run cheaper on Linux and free resources, gives it an economical gain and a greener footprint.

Or am I wrong?

What are you thinking about this Linux initiatives from Microsoft?

Eager to read your comments,

Marcel