Amazon Linux has been a thing for at least a decade.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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Amazon OS
shudders
You don't want to use Amazon Linux?
"Bring Alexa to your datacenter! She promises to only spy on the admins and users of their node. Promise!"
(promise is not valid in 98 countries, terms and conditions apply, visit alexa.aws.com/plans for more details)
"Alexa every-fucking-where! Because fuck you!" happy musical jingle
Windows sucks. Linux has so many more features than you could ever think. Ulimit is a major one. B.P.F. is another.
I don't think 10 lifetimes is enough for me to learn about all the software that people out there run on Linux servers. Then I die my last lifetime and people come up with new software. Myself as an individual could see all that and say that software like that should be available on a server OS especially to compete with Linux. A huge company with over a hundred thousand employees. They can probably crowdsource through their employees a way longer list than me but will leadership read the list? Will they greenlight funding development for all that software? Will they match up to as good and ideally better to be worth paying for than the free and open source stuff on Linux? Will they keep up development on all that software or fall behind the open source stuff?
If they can't do that, there's no reason for any company to smartly spend money on a proprietary server OS license for what would be immediately a worse product or a product that is at best just as good or a product that would inevitably end up being worse than the Linux ecosystem. I consider it an impossibility for a new proprietary OS to cover the whole breadth of server software out there and even the whole breadth of server hardware support. I'm not sure what the status is of Windows Server ARM and Windows Server RISC-V. Don't know how popular POWER is on server or if SPARC is still kicking. That's top 5 largest company in the world Microsoft that's been doing operating systems for like 40 years.
Doing a Linux spin makes the most sense.
Plus Linux development is supported by a huge amount of large companies. It's not rag tag open source freelancers vs mega-corporation. It would be a collection of mega-corporations to small corporations plus independent individuals vs a mega-corporation
Microsoft agrees. Azure Linux is getting more and more beefed up all the time. Soon it will be a full fledged consumer OS and not just for Azure containers.
Sure, the list of software that runs on Linux is very long, but the list of software that I need to run is very short and most of it only runs on Windows.
In most business scenarios, the software is a very small part of the business. A manufacturing company with a very large, very expensive, and very, very difficult-to-replace machine is controlled by software, and that software runs on Windows.
The thread is about servers and supercomputers being dominated by Linux
Yeah? That software runs on a server...
Amazon has their own Linux dist that is relatively popular among their customers
https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/
As for your question, consider thus: I think many users here have the resources to make their own personal Linux distributions without drawing from an existing base distro. Yet very few do. Why do you think that is? There's a lot of overlap in the answers.
The corporate overlords, that love monetizing every breath we take, aren't particularly keen on having to spend money whenever they can avoid it. Linux is by far the most used kernel in the world, and aside from Android phones, where it has been monopolized and bastardized by Google, it's regular consumers who benefit the least from it.
Windows is dogshit, and must bee rebooted weekly at minimum. Linux can stay running for years. Uptime and reliability matter.