Comment by technofiend
8 years ago
Although it's appreciated as a UNIX admin I can honestly say I don't use Windows by choice but because my enterprise says I must. That's partially because all the productivity tools are found there and partially because the desktop guys are massive Microsoft bigots and refuse to host anything else. (It's OK I can say that as a massive UNIX bigot and besides they'll tell you the same.)
And frankly with the tiniest bit of effort I can crank up a local xterm and then ssh which gives me lovely things like color, font choice, easy window size changes and thousands of lines of scrollback. Why in 2017 would I want to use a bare naked ssh client unless there is simply no other choice?
Default packages are extremely important. That you can walk up to any computer and get work done without installing anything, even downloading putty.exe is far too much effort in some cases. Also it is kind of rude to just download and execute things on friends/colleagues computers ad hoc.
If this will be installed by default it will be awesome, and imho even the process described here by enabling a feature is still better than putty.exe (it will get managed by windows and updated if need be etc.).
For my own windows computers though, the first thing I install is WSL and a proper terminal app (cmder).
Yeah it's handy to have by default, no doubt. But unless it also includes all the other client modes as well (scp, sftp, etc) and all the features found in Putty to boot I think the author's conclusion that Putty's days are numbered is a bit unrealistic.
I will say if this includes active directory integration so that ssh'ing from a windows box to a kerberos-protected unix one that could be slightly helpful. And if not that's just another reason to keep using putty. LOL.
Downloading putty.exe (or executing on a USB or share) is less invasive than installing the OpenSSH client feature.
Oh you fancy people with the ability to download and execute things.