In short: microsoft was afraid of losing devs to linux due to an increase in linux servers.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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How does this help though? If anything they would've helped themselves by porting more Linux commands to work natively in Windows. This move makes it easier for Windows admins and devs to switch to Linux. With the latest horrible moves in the Windows desktop space I can't believe they're trying to become the "RedHat of Windows".
- Embrace
- Extend
- Extinguish
It's been the Microsoft Business plan since practically the beginning.
If your os is windows and use ps, you can use ps on your linux vms as well. It prevents that you have to learn power and bourne. Such that it feels a bit more integrated. If you couldn't use ps, you had to use both shells which may lead to a migration to linux
No one in there right mind uses Powershell on Linux
They like Linux servers since they make boatloads of money from Azure.
What they are scared of are Linux desktops and Macs. Windows is losing market share and Microsoft is to big to actual know why.
"Why is everyone going to linux when we are shoving copilot into fucking notepad.exe??"
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Powershell is annoyingly good though.
Can someone explain to me why? The outputs are objects and that is cool for scripts, but the fact that every small thing is its own cmdlet is super annoying. I can do everything in Linux if I know 10 commands. In PS I would always have to look up everything.
the fact that every small thing is its own cmdlet is super annoying. I can do everything in Linux if I know 10 commands
That sounds more like a clash of cultures than a real problem. In Linux you need to know 10 options and possibly subcommands for each command. Naturally the same concept has different flags, and the same flag has different meanings in different commands. Is that really better?
If I recall the Verb-Noun idea is supposed to make it clear what is happening, take a look through stuff like the approved verbs for defining cmdlets. There's aliases and stuff for sure for example I think ls is an aliases for Get-ChildItem in PowerShell.
It's supposed to make it so you don't necessarily need to look things up, need to do something to an item? Well you can Copy, Remove, Rename, Move etc, and while yeah that's a super basic example that you know the equivalent linux commands for, the concept is supposed to apply everywhere. Now, whether or not people follow the guidelines is probably another story.
I don't really hate shell scripting, feel like they all have their place, complex stuff though is nicer in straight PowerShell than bash IMO, but I'm fine using either.
The aliases are good for the most part, but curl is an alias for Invoke-Webrequest, even though the two are incompatible.
Same here. I keep hearing that Powershell is so good, but I have to look up every little thing. It's all too specific and you can't remember it all.
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I wouldn't go that far
As much as I hate windows powershell is actually decent.
The problem is that on Linux it competes with bash and dozens of way better terminals.
We're not talking terminals, though, are we? You can run pwsh in dozens of terminals. As a shell, it's... Very decent.
I've been a Linux sysadmin for decades and Windows for the year 8 years or so. I started using Windows with an air of contempt, and still do. I hate myself for saying this, but Powershell is better than bash. Bash is very limited if you consider only bash. For bash to be useful you need the entire GNU suite with grep, cut, awk etc.
That's like saying that your car is very limited because you need cylinders, spark plugs, oil filters...
Well yeah, you do and typically that comes with the car, just like grep comes with bash
But that's almost never how a system is configured. The entire point is that bash, zsh, fish etc. can make use of those utilities. You don't need bash trying to reinvent everything. You don't want that. That's why changing shells is generally painless and a strength, not a weakness.
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Yes, that's the point of the shell. It's the glue for all the little tools.
So you’re saying Powershell doesn’t uphold Unix Philosophy and thus shouldn’t be used?
PowerShell actually does uphold the Linux philosophy pretty well. Most functions are in modules that can be imported, disabled or swapped out as appropriate.
PS looking good
I hate to say it, but powershell is better than bash.
I'll take your word for it. I could never wrap my head around PowerShell back when I still had a Windows install. Whenever I could, I would use either the DOS prompt or WSL/Ubuntu. I may not be great at Bash or DOS but at least I'm not having to resort to cargo culting to do anything. Probably a sign I'm getting old.
there are other shells that have all the nice powershell things without the weird stuff (at least for not windows people), like nushell
although I wouldn't be surprised if powershell was the thing that started the trend of better shells
TIL. Looks like I will be installing Nushell. This is neat. Especially how everything returns the final value.
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Slow as shit though.
The blue powershell window is for me, but running powershell.exe in conhost, or windows terminal is fast enough.
What do you mean? If you run powershell directly it opens up either in conhost or Windows Terminal, depending on whatever is your default, doesn't it? Unless you mean PowerShell ISE or whatever it's called.
I mean running it directly shows up in the ugly blue window, and that's slower in my experience.
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Long ago I tried a cygwin based openssh server in Windows. Permissions were a real issue.
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I work on both Linux and windows machines for some software projects. It's nice to be able to write powershell helper scripts and have it work on both.
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