.NET 6 enables platform-independent applications for Linux, macOS and Windows. They can now also be developed and run on Linux.
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 computer. Microsoft invites .NET developers on the “Linux journey” and promises regular security patches and updates.
In parallel, Canonical released minimal container images with the .NET runtimes. The new “chiselled containers” follow the OCI standard and have been trimmed down to a minimum: the smallest Ubuntu image has a compressed size of just 6 MB and is thus in the region of the minimal Alpine Linux specially developed for container use. Images with the .NET runtime and the ASP.NET runtime are a good 100 MB in size. They contain no shell and run without a root user, so they are not vulnerable to many attacks.
At the end of last year, Microsoft released .NET 6, the successor to .NET Core, which can be used to create applications for Linux, macOS and Windows. Originally planned to merge with Xamarin to build iOS and Android apps has been postponed.
