Comment by yjftsjthsd-h
1 year ago
Ah, that makes sense then; I was really confused at first because I couldn't figure out why Windows would want a built-in text-mode editor. I suppose if folks are seriously using SSH to access Windows machines ... then I have other questions about why not RDP, but if that's a real thing people are doing then adding a built-in editor for them makes sense.
SSH is ubiquitous, lightweight, and now works for all machines equally.
SSH is integrated with everything and can be used to manage, transfer files/mount remote folders, forward ports in either direction, or proxy any network traffic through the remote end for debugging/access. You can open a remote folder directly in vscode, Zed or similar over SSH.
RDP to a standard Windows server (this was previously called "core" - having a desktop environment is a non-default add-on now) is silly as you're RDP'ing to solely see a cmd.exe window that asks you to use console-based configuration (sconfig.exe).
RDP to a windows server with "Desktop Experience" is silly because it is comparatively sluggish, streaming a (likely unaccelerated) video feed of heavier GUI applications vs. sending just a few text strings back and forth during editing.
Not to mention that containerized windows has no graphical stack and requires a text-centric workflow.
This might be the most obvious use case: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
I'm a powershell bigot and spend most of my windows admin life in a terminal (or vscode) so my take is to simply use psremoting but ssh is there if you need.
I prefer SSH because it fits into a standard workflow with far larger ecosystem (my file manager and editors can browse SSH directly, traffic can easily be routed over SSH in either direction), and is already what I'd use for the majority of servers and machines.
psremoting would be limited specifically to remote PowerShell on windows, which is comparatively limited. Even if I was purely a Windows admin I'd consider the SSH approach more powerful.
Understood and SSH figures heavily into any admin's workflow, but PSRemote brings some advantages when you're using powershell. Much like you can execute remote commands in SSH, I can do that w/ psremote while keeping the full object pipeline intact, whereas ssh just squashes all output to a single text string like most unix-native tooling.
Posh remoting works well because it's posh and you get all the nice object-oriented things that come from that. You do miss features like tunneling so I have SSH to fall back on where needed (and also for non-windows workloads etc). Right tool for the job and all that, and if you're not a heavy posh user the ssh option makes a lot more sense.