Comment by colechristensen

Honestly, I think the biggest driver is the type of developers you find now. With Open-Source being such a large area for almost every CS student and budding developer - the normal work environment is becoming very Linux-heavy.

A natural result is now the Devs working at Microsoft ALSO wish they could use the command line for everything in Windows. Thus Powershell, and things like AZ CLI becoming much better.

This is so true. Another attemp to explain might be: The cmd.exe and PuTTy always feel like foreign bodies in the windows world, they don't integrate, they are an rough try to fill the gap between the "old" command line world and the "new" windows world (in the win95 language). In contrast, already the OS X terminal feels like a first class citizen in the environment.

It is worth to emphasize what has been said before here: Since Windows popularity is decending, they start to catch up with that attitude. Nowadays, for instance, you can open the terminal from every folder in explorer.exe -- this is exactly this kind of integration Windows missed for 20 years. Once they kick out cmd.exe in favour of something like Console2 (https://www.hanselman.com/blog/Console2ABetterWindowsCommand...) and update the toolchain even more than they did with PowerShell (actually integrating GNU/bash was a major step), developers will come back.

> Remove the network cable while in an SSH session, and PuTTy will immediately disconnect you.

But it's not a problem with PuTTY, it's a problem with Windows networking subsystem. Once you remove cable, the whole interface immediately goes down, IP address gets deconfigured, and all open sockets using the address get closed. (I was bitten in the ass by this when I had several Windows Server machines under my care.)

You'll get exactly the same with any other long running TCP connection.

nix user going on 25 years here. I use WinSCP and PuTTY to all the time and they work just fine.

> Remove the network cable while in an SSH session...

This argument seems a bit contrived. Is this honestly something you're concerned with on a daily basis? I doubt it.

> Try doing a port forward, and you'll need to dig around instead of just typing it into a terminal.

No, you don't just type "it" into a terminal. First, you have to lookup the command syntax if you haven't used it in a while. Then you have to type it in correctly and if your syntax is off by even one character, things don't work.

> Also aesthetically, PuTTy has nothing on Terminal.app or iTerm2 etc.

Aesthetics are nice but do you even have a tool like WinSCP? It graphically displays the remote filesystem over your SSH connection and then lets you open a terminal to the path you were looking at. I don't even have to type my password when I open a new terminal from WinSCP.

Who doesn't use tmux or screen, anyway? Always safe from network issues and all the benefits of multi-tasking.

Mobaxterm is the shell Windows should have had.

Text rendering (old problem) and high DPI scaling (new problem) are what keep me firmly planted in macOS land.

Wrt less: Assuming End just goes to the bottom of the document (I'm away from my computer so I can't check), G does the same thing

As a counterpoint, I LOVE the whole ~/.ssh directory. It keeps everything in one place, is text-editable, is cross-platform between Mac and Linux, and easily transferred to new machines, or restored to existing ones after a fresh reinstall.

With Putty, if I want to change, say, the size of the terminal opened on connections, I'd have to update every Putty session individually. Been there; done that. Ridiculous. That should be a function of the terminal you run SSH under, not the SSH session itself.

The config all lives in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\SimonTatham\PuTTY. You can export it all via regedit or: reg export HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\SimonTatham\PuTTY PuttyConnections.reg

It is definitely a lot messier than working with ssh_config.

There are versions of PuTTY that store the config in files, usually with names like Porta-PuTTY. I use the hacked up Xming Portable Putty because I do a lot of X forwarding and the base PuTTY used to have some stability issues with it. They're probably fixed now, but I still use the hacked up PuTTY because my configs are in the text files instead of the Registry and regular PuTTY doesn't know about them.

It's all in the registry. I forget where, but search for the hostname or ip of one of your configs in regedit (CAVEAT EMPTOR!!!!) and export the whole folder with all the configs in. You'll get a .reg file (or whatever it is) that you can double click on any other windows machine and your settings will get ported over. Paths to key files are preserved verbatim.

Again CAVEAT EMPTOR (as with anything to do with regedit).

All of the sessions are stored in the registry, which you can dump to a text file easily enough. A couple of minutes with awk or something and you'd have your ssh_config file.

It's signed now

PuTTY on Windows does all of those things perfectly reasonably for me (I just checked) - it might be as easy as making sure your PuTTY environment defaults to UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1 or various codepages.

Yes. All of them.

Oh, you meant on Windows.

You can convert PuTTY keys to the OpenSSH format with putty-keygen (or what it's called), but not the other way around.

Sure you can: https://devops.profitbricks.com/tutorials/use-ssh-keys-with-...

If I remember correctly it was possible before, is this something new?

Been a while since I've used a Mac, but I seem to remember that at one time, Terminal.app lacked tabs, but they were added in a later version of the OS.

What are the killer features of iTerm2?

I tried iTerm2, don't see what the fuss is. I spend all of my terminal time in tmux anyways.

Powershell doesn't but not everything is powershell. Win32 underneath pokes its head out occasionally. And I don't want to use powershell. It's horrid in so many ways.

I'm a Unix user since about '93 for ref as well. I am poisoned with forward slashes everywhere :)

...meh, just limit yourself to the tops of the lines like Thinkpad, XPSs etc., make sure any networking components are branded Intel, pick Intel CPUs' integrated graphics or not-low-end Nvidia, and everything will just work fine out of the box with an LTS Ubuntu or latest Fedora (basically pick whatever's closest to what you use on your servers).

But yeah, if you buy anything that's not part of the "top of the line developer notebook" category, specifically the Intel not AMD ones, then almost nothing will work out of the box :)

I'm pretty sure that I've spent less time maintaining my laptop than my colleagues who are on OS X. That obviously isn't the case for every laptop, but I don't think that your statements generalize well either.

"Sucks" is subjective; you're allowed to think that.

In years past you may have spent hours getting wireless or sound working. These days, if you buy decent, mainstream hardware it just works. Ubuntu does a great job of getting out of the way.

I'm a Fedora guy, myself, but find myself recommending Xubuntu to more and more people for casual computing because 1) it really does just work, and 2) Xfce is lightweight and lets you use your CPU for doing real work vs. holding up a bloated windows manager.

linux desktop does not suck.

Linux on unsupported laptops (which is most of them) sucks big time, but not linux desktop itself. It works great on standard desktop computers (towers)

you should make that distinction, because otherwise you'll just start a flame war.

Just to be clear, if a Macbook works better for you or if you just prefer macOS, by all means, go ahead. Macbooks, from what I hear, must be superb machines, and while I prefer Linux with a Mate or XFCE desktop, I have used a Mac for a while and there are things I do miss. And a lot of software is available for Windows and Mac only; given the choice between Windows and macOS, I wouldn't have to think long.

I hear that argument frequently. On macOS (or even Windows) things just work(tm), while on Linux (or some BSD), there is always something that does not work correctly.

I guess I must be quite lucky. A long time ago, I positively enjoyed spending an entire weekend getting a sound card to work or something. To be honest, these days I consider myself too old for that stuff. I, too, like it when things just work. But really, Linux as a desktop system has come a long way, and for the past couple of years, things have pretty much just worked(tm) for me.

Picking hardware that is supported by Linux takes a little care, so does picking a distro[1], especially with laptops. But I prefer to do a little research before buying a laptop anyway, because I am usually on a budget.

[1] In my experience, the more recent the hardware, the more unlikely Debian is to work. OpenSuse has worked well for me, though.

I put Ubuntu (Mate) on an old Macbook of mine because it was absolutely crawling with MacOs on it. The only driver it needed was a Wifi driver. Everything else worked fine out of the box.

Also, I run an Intel Nuc (laptop hardware, essentially) with Ubuntu as a main development machine. 0 problems. 0% in the way.

OSX is great, don't get me wrong. But, it's been years since I've ran into driver problems with desktop Linux.

> If I had a Linux laptop, an extraordinary amount of my time would be spent trying to make it work. Wireless breaks, sound breaks, upgrades break everything.

At our office, the macOS laptops tend to have the most problems with sound & graphics; the Linux desktops, OTOH, Just Work™. I find that pretty funny, actually, because I would have expected it to be the other way around.

The most problems I ever had with Wifi was a mac machine (rMBP13). In the office, usually during RDP sessions, it often lost the connection and couldn't reconnect until reboot.

I've never had anything similar happen with a PC (we use Thinkpads), whether running Linux or Windows.

My Mac problem was solved using ethernet adapter.

Linux Mint worked perfectly on my T420, and I expect it to work perfectly on the T440 I'm picking up today to replace it.

Sure, not the very newest hardware, but it's not like laptops have gotten significantly more powerful for anything that actually matters, for the last couple of years.

I haven't had any trouble with Linux desktop on mainstream laptops for the past 15 or so years. The days of hand tweaking your Xfree86 configuration files and refresh rates are gone.

Of course there are things that are not working so nicely, and are not meant to. For instance, running RHEL (which is a server OS) on a laptop (which typically has new optimized hardware which is not meant to be server) and then expecting graphics and WiFi work on a kernel that is much older than your hardware and thus has no drivers.

Perhaps you might expect some trouble also when running Windows Server 2012 on a new laptop? I don't know, I haven't tried, but wouldn't be surprised.

You can buy a laptop that ships with Linux, and then you get the same works-out-of-the-box experience as a Mac.

The Dell XPS 13 is a good choice if you want something from a major manufacturer, but there are loads of smaller companies, too.

Well, if you need certain applications that are not available on Linux, all the hardware support in the world does not help you.

That argument trumps pretty much everything else. If my boss came into my office today and told me to switch all of our desktop computers to Linux, as much as I would enjoy that, I would have to tell him that it cannot be done, because we use a lot of software that just is not available for Linux. (And a fair amount of it is not even available for macOS.)

The reason for the confusion is that there are two separate clipboards: one for Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V and one for mouse-select/mouse-middle-click. To use the first clipboard on terminal emulators you need to use Ctrl-Shift-C/Ctrl-Shift-V instead because the Ctrl-* shortcuts have legacy meanings in the terminal. I don't remember ever needing to use Insert for copy pasting (although you can use it if you want).

I don't know what examples you had in mind when you mentioned applications having incompatible keyboards. The only one I know that does that is Vim (which by default uses the internal clipboard when you use its cut, copy and paste commands) but Vim is definitely not your average Linux application...

Well, Terminal.app also has mouse-select/mouse-middle-click, which is a separate clipbard (from Cm-C/Cm-V) as well

MobaXTerm doesn't require "installation", there's a portable version as well.

I've been a cmder user for years and love it... but AFAIK it doesn't have an SSH client built in?

One thing you need to be careful with regarding WSL is that it still doesn't correctly handle umask[0].

There are some workarounds if you use particular terminals (for instance you can't use Mobaxterm as it forces 777 regardless) but it's not exactly 'it just works' yet.

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/352