Defender for Endpoint Enhanced to Support Linux Desktops

Linux desktops, increasingly used for developer and user workstations, and the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 are now both supported in preview for Defender for Endpoint Plan 1 and Plan 2. This support could help organizations looking to unify endpoint detection and response (EDR) and antimalware across all of their developer and user systems.

Defender for Endpoint (DfE) has historically supported many server distributions of Linux such as Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Fedora, running on either x64 or Arm64 hardware. However, DfE has not supported desktop distributions of Linux prior to this preview.

The support for desktop distributions, currently in a preview, should allow organizations to use either DfE Plan 1 (antimalware) or DfE Plan 2 (EDR) with Linux, whether on physical clients, servers, or virtual desktops, or running Linux inside of WSL or a WSL container (WSLc). (WSLc is a newer approach to WSL intended to allow users or applications to interact with Linux distributions within containers.)