Microsoft and Canonical have announced the availability of .NET 6 for Ubuntu 22.04. The command sudo apt install dotnet6 brings the NET 6 SDK, the runtime for platform-independent console applications, and the ASP.NET Core runtime for platform-independent web applications to the desktop. Microsoft invites .NET developers on the “Linux journey” and promises regular updates and security patches.

In parallel, Canonical released minimal container images with .NET runtimes. The new “chiseled containers” follow the OCI standard and have been reduced to a minimum: the smallest Ubuntu image has a compressed size of only 6 MB and is therefore in the region of the minimal Alpine Linux specially developed for use in containers. Images with the .NET runtime and the ASP.NET runtime are 100 MB in size. They do not contain a shell and run without a root user, so they are not vulnerable to many attacks.

Late last year, Microsoft released .NET 6, the successor to .NET Core, which can be used to build applications for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Originally planned to merge with Xamarin to build iOS and Android apps has been delayed.

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