[WorldMaker]

I just used "nano" as a general term because I couldn't think of a better one (which does show my personal bias here more than the ecosystem's), but I was also thinking about about a lot of deployments on some sort of container optimized Alpine Linux, I forget what that was specifically called.

So far as I'm aware most of the remaining cross platform concerns in the .NET ecosystem are almost all in drawing/rendering and in cross-platform desktop UI. There's at least one MAUI fork working on a Linux renderer for MAUI UIs, but no official support like every other platform MAUI supports today (Windows, iOS, Android, Mac Catalyst). Drawing/rendering is mostly a legacy ecosystem support issue: System.Drawing API has been around a very long time and was always just a thin wrapper around Windows GDI that it had some abstraction leaks that the .NET team thought were too hard to patch and instead gave up on making System.Drawing itself cross-platform. There are multiple cross-platform replacements for System.Drawing backed by everything from Cairo to SDL to ImageMagick, but they are replacements and for the most part aren't "drop in" replacements and there's still just so many libraries (and developers) so used to System.Drawing being always available that it's still too easy in the ecosystem to stumble into a library you want to use with a hard dependency on System.Drawing.

Other than needing to watch for System.Drawing dependencies, I've got ASP.NET Core/EF web backends that build, test, run on Linux no sweat with no cross-platform issues. (Including fun things like cross-builds: a Linux CI that is also building the Windows x64 self-contained binaries for other servers. I can't think of that many cross-platform stacks where you can do that.)

I think it's still very rare to hear about cross-platform .NET not because it's uncommon (it may be much more common than anyone suspects), but just that especially to HN, .NET is still very much "dark matter". It's out there getting (boring) jobs done (in boring companies) and no one is really blogging about it or "hyping it" because no one really needs to be. That's why "newsworthy" may have touched a bit of a nerve.