In this blogpost, I want to walk through how I automated the full lifecycle of the Intune app on Ubuntu - launching it at login, getting rid of the manual sign-in click, dealing with deployments that fail on some devices, and keeping the app up to date - all pushed through Intune itself.

During one of my engagements I had to onboard a couple of Ubuntu Linux devices into Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE), and the requirement was to do this through Microsoft Intune. On paper this is simple: you push a script that runs the onboarding package, the device onboards, and it shows up in the Defender portal. But in reality, onboarding linux devices in MDE via Intune turns out not to be as simple as with Windows and MacOS. I ended up spending quite some time figuring out why the deployment kept showing up as **'error'** in Intune - and the rabbit hole went deeper than I expected, all the way down to an error message that had nothing to do with the actual problem.