Yes—on current .NET versions, “cross-platform” includes Linux.

ComWrappers can be used on Linux to interoperate with native objects that implement the IUnknown binary contract:

QueryInterface
AddRef
Release
<additional interface methods>

Microsoft describes the IUnknown ABI as supported on all .NET platforms, and ComWrappers provides the runtime-side object identity and lifetime-management machinery. Microsoft Learn+1

What Linux support actually provides

On Linux, ComWrappers can:

• expose a managed object through an IUnknown-style vtable;

• wrap a native IUnknown* as a managed object;

• associate native pointers with managed wrappers;

• implement the QueryInterface/AddRef/Release lifetime model;

• call interface methods through native function pointers;

• use source-generated wrappers through [GeneratedComInterface] and [GeneratedComClass] in .NET 8+. Microsoft Learn+1

This is useful when a Linux native library intentionally exposes a COM-like, ABI-stable object interface, even though it is not using Windows COM services.

For example:

C
// Exported by a Linux shared library
IUnknownLike* create_audio_processor(void);

Your .NET code could obtain that pointer through LibraryImport/P/Invoke and then wrap it with:

C#
object wrapper = comWrappers.GetOrCreateObjectForComInstance(
    nativePointer,
    CreateObjectFlags.None);

What it does not provide

It does not mean that Linux has the Windows COM infrastructure.

You do not automatically get:

• CoCreateInstance;

• CLSID/ProgID registration through the Windows Registry;

• COM apartments and Windows message pumping;

• the Running Object Table;

• DCOM;

• COM proxy/stub infrastructure;

• OLE or ActiveX;

• normal Windows COM server activation;

• automatic support for arbitrary Windows COM components.

On Linux, you normally obtain the initial native interface pointer from an exported C function, a native factory, or some other library-specific mechanism. ComWrappers handles the wrapper and lifetime side—not discovery or activation of the native component. Microsoft’s tutorial explicitly treats COM activation as a separate concern and uses the Windows CoCreateInstance API only as a Windows-specific example. Microsoft Learn

Important version qualification

There is a slight historical imprecision in the wording “.NET 5+”:

• ComWrappers was introduced in the .NET 5 era.

• The runtime work explicitly enabling it on Linux was merged in July 2021 for the .NET 6 release.

• The corresponding runtime issue was assigned to the .NET 6.0.0 milestone. GitHub+1

Therefore, the safest practical statement is:

ComWrappers supports Linux in .NET 6 and later.

For .NET 8, .NET 9, .NET 10, and later, Linux is unambiguously included.

The conceptual distinction

The documentation is referring to:

Cross-platform support for the IUnknown ABI and lifetime model

not:

A cross-platform implementation of the complete Microsoft COM platform

That distinction is the key to interpreting the quoted sentence. The project context similarly calls for separating low-level technical capability from the broader platform infrastructure it may appear to imply.

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