.NET Core is a general purpose development platform maintained by Microsoft and the .NET community on GitHub. It is cross-platform, supporting Windows, macOS and Linux, and can be used in device, cloud, and embedded/IoT scenarios. This package is required to run Windows Desktop applications with the .NET Core Runtime. This is a *metapackage*, which installs the latest release of .NET Core Desktop Runtime across all versions (up to 3.1.x). .NET 5 and later are supported by the `dotnet-*` family of packages.