Microsoft .NET 6 bundled with Ubuntu Linux

Microsoft’s flagship cross-platform development platform, .NET 6, is now available in Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution. The goal is to simplify access to Microsoft’s development platform and improve Ubuntu as a platform for .NET application development, the companies said.

Specifically, .NET 6 is being bundled with Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu Chiseled Containers, the latter being Linux container images that improve security by minimizing services and omitting a package manager and shell. Microsoft and Ubuntu said they will work together to ensure new .NET releases are available with new Ubuntu releases.

.NET 6 arrived last November. The platform can be installed with the apt install dotnet6 command on Ubuntu. The .NET 6 SDK can be installed on Ubuntu 22.04 via the following commands, according to an August 16 bulletin:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install dotnet6

The Chiseled Ubuntu image is 100MB smaller than previous Ubuntu images, Canonical said. The command to pull the ASP.NET Chiseled Image is as follows:

docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/nightly/aspnet:6.0-jammy-chiseled

Three layers of Chiseled Ubuntu images with .NET are being offered for Arm64 and x64:

• mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/nightly/runtime-deps:6.0-jammy-chiseled
• mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/nightly/runtime:6.0-jammy-chiseled
• mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/nightly/aspnet:6.0-jammy-chiseled

These images will be offered in the nightly repos while Chiseled Ubuntu is in a preview stage. They will be supported in production later this year.

Canonical is publishing Chiseled Ubuntu container images for .NET that include new APT packages, via Docker Hub:

• https://hub.docker.com/r/ubuntu/dotnet-deps
• https://hub.docker.com/r/ubuntu/dotnet-runtime
• https://hub.docker.com/r/ubuntu/dotnet-aspnet

Microsoft plans to release .NET 7 in November. It is now a preview phase.