Microsoft’s CBL-Mariner Linux distribution is becoming more and more important to Azure, both in the cloud and on premises. As well as hosting the GUI features of WSL 2 in Windows 11, it’s the container host in Azure Kubernetes Service and is available as a base container image in the Microsoft Container Registry, plus it supports distro-less containers on Azure. That makes it worth spending time with CBL-Mariner, learning its features and capabilities and seeing how it can affect your code.