The 22.04 release of Ubuntu now contains .NET

Microsoft and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu 22.04, have announced native .NET support. Ubuntu and other Linux distributions have long supported open-source .NET, and this collaboration will strengthen it. 

A tiny new Open Container Initiative .NET 6 LTS and ASP.NET compliant appliance image has also been released by the company.

A 'Chiseled Ubuntu Container' does not come with a shell, package manager, or anything else unnecessary, making them more secure. 

As compared to their predecessors, the chiseled images are about 100MB smaller. The smallest .NET application image weighs in at 12.9MB, with only .NET runtime dependencies. As a result, Chiseled images are a great choice for cloud-based containers.

A new Ubuntu .deb package created by Canonical and Microsoft serves as the foundation for these .NET packages. Providing timely security patches is their goal.

The NET releases have been made available to Ubuntu developers. Canonical will be provided with Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) security information ahead of public release. Microsoft will receive Canonical's security data before it's published in return.

As well as working with Microsoft's new distro maintainer .NET group, Canonical will utilize its own Linux distributions. The goal of the project is to secure the software supply chain from source to packaging. 

The two companies will work directly together without intermediaries. As a result, Canonical assets are effectively distributed at zero distance, according to Microsoft's .NET Program Manager Richard Lander.

Microsoft and Canonical work together to ensure a seamless transition between new .NET releases and Ubuntu releases. As a result, the .NET LTS, which ships in November, is bundled into the Ubuntu LTS in April.

The .NET deb packages have now been included in Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish 22.04 LTS for the x64 architecture. As well as Canonical's other long-term Ubuntu releases, will soon be available for the Arm64 architecture.