Microsoft and Canonical announce native .NET 6 for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Microsoft and Canonical have entered into a new partnership, announcing the availability of native .NET for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS hosts and containers.

• .NET developers can now install ASP.NET and .NET SDKs and runtimes from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with a single “apt install” command
• Canonical releases new, ultra-small OCI-compliant device image for .NET 6 LTS and ASP.NET runtime without shell or package manager
• Microsoft and Canonical are partnering to secure the software supply chain between .NET and Ubuntu, with enterprise-grade support

” Canonical is proud to welcome the .NET development platform, one of Microsoft’s earliest contributions to the open source project; starting with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, it will be a native experience for Ubuntu host and container images. .NET developers will be able to start with Ubuntu their Linux journey, benefiting from timely security patches and new releases “.

Install .NET 6 on Ubuntu:

# quickly install a bundle with both the SDK and the runtime
sudo apt update && sudo apt install dotnet6
# or cherry-pick only the dependencies you need to develop or run
sudo apt install dotnet-sdk-6.0
sudo apt install dotnet-runtime-6.O
sudo apt install aspnetcore-runtime-6.0

The announcement states that the provenance of software is more important than ever for all open source consumers; both the open source community and businesses need to have confidence in the dependencies of their software. 

Microsoft and Canonical are cooperating for security; once the partnership is reached, the two parties can share content directly, without intermediaries. ” We now have an effective zero-distance supply chain for all Canonical assets ,” said Richard Lander, .NET program manager . 

Microsoft also recently established a distribution maintainer group for .NET; Canonical is now a member of that group, working to protect the software supply chain from source code to packages.

Meanwhile, Ubuntu users will have a brand new .NET LTS in every Ubuntu LTS series. 

Microsoft and Canonical will work to ensure that new .NET releases are released alongside new Ubuntu releases and work well together. 

“Establishing the shortest chain of trust between Microsoft and Canonical is critical to building this partnership. The result is a straightforward developer experience, as well as regular security patches and updates.”

Canonical’s goal is to provide the smallest OCI image ever, while still providing known and trusted Ubuntu content. 

It has released beta versions of two new Ubuntu-based .NET 6 OCI images,  maintained as part of the existing LTS image portfolio :

• A 12.9MB (uncompressed) image containing only .NET runtime dependencies for standalone .NET applications (shortening the supply chain between Canonical and Microsoft): hub.docker.com/r/ubuntu/dotnet-deps
• A 117MB (uncompressed) image including the newly released .NET 6 runtime .deb package, installed from the official Ubuntu repositories: hub.docker.com/r/ubuntu/dotnet-runtime ; similarly, the ASP.NET runtime so  hub.docker.com/r/ubuntu/dotnet-aspnet

According to the introduction, the collaborative project is the first in a series of projects Canonical has planned for .NET and Ubuntu. 

The .NET deb package is now in Ubuntu Jammy 22.04 LTS for x64 architecture and will be available soon for Arm64 architecture and all newer Ubuntu releases.

More details can be found in the official announcement .