"For years, Apple MacBooks have been the go-to choice for many admins partly because getting to a ssh shell is so easy."
I really can't believe somebody ever bought a MacBook because they found installing putty too much of hassle.
I really can't believe somebody ever bought a MacBook because they found installing putty too much of hassle.
The pleasant interaction with other *nix systems was and is a primary driver for my choice of OS X.
PuTTy sucks. Every other terminal I have tried on Windows sucks. Getting terminal-based software to work on Windows sucks. I stopped trying years ago because a terminal on OS X doesn't suck. It might not be a perfect 10, but I'm happy with it.
I'm also more interested in Windows more and more as time passes.
Losing as the most popular OS has made Microsoft start doing some of the right things.
Never been a problem for me. What are your complaints?
I barely notice the difference, but if I had to choose I'd take putty over Terminal.app, which has default keyboard-shortcuts that clash with Bash. (I believe it was Alt-b, Alt-d, or maybe Alt-f. I forget exactly.)
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.
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.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/10/11/what...
I say all of this having been a paying MobaXterm customer in the past.
These days I use ConEmu, WSL, and Bitvise (for those rare occasions I want to easily tunnel to the Windows side).
> 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.
I like Putty's graphical session manager; on OSX and Linux I don't want to fiddle with ~/.ssh/config.
The lock-in with Putty is annoying though, being able to export all configured sessions to a .ssh/config file would be awesome.
Again CAVEAT EMPTOR (as with anything to do with regedit).
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.
It is definitely a lot messier than working with ssh_config.
Okay, I think I just found a new contender with GIMP for 'worst software title'...
Sure you can: https://devops.profitbricks.com/tutorials/use-ssh-keys-with-...
It's generally difficult and awkward to work with and unpleasant to look at.
Oh, you meant on Windows.
If you use git on Windows with PuTTY/plink it's also significantly slower than OpenSSH. I saw clones of a large repository go from 60 KB/s to 600 KB/s after switching from PuTTY to OpenSSH.
What are the killer features of iTerm2?
I think it's the explosion of open source and the corresponding command line tools that they started investing some time and effort to the command line.
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.
Macs historically have always been a decent compromise for having decent GUI/Linux-like terminal/nice hardware.
It's kind of a different environment now, with PC manufacturers coming up with well designed laptops and Windows offering more Linux integration.
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...
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. I would have to spend a serious amount of time and research finding a laptop that had good Linux support... regardless I would still probably have to spend hours trying to get the sound or the wireless or sleep or some feature or another to work properly.
OS X just gets out of the way. I have never had to put any work into making the graphics card work or making sound work or making the network work or fixing boot... you get the picture.
If I'm using Linux on a laptop to do any sort of work, a sizable portion of the work becomes keeping Linux working on the laptop and I don't want that.
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.
One thing I've learned is distrohopping is a must if your hardware is an edge case... that said, since moving to Manjaro, I haven't had to use anything else.
The Linux desktop has come a long way, even in just the last year or two. I know everyone always says that, so take it with a grain of salt, but I have never been happier with the state of the Linux desktop.
Might it be that we tend to like what we're used to? When I jumped from WinXP to a Gnome2-desktop, I tried to make it a bit more like WinXP, even though these days I would probably want nothing of how WinXP desktop is laid about.
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 :)
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.
The biggie is the GPU. T420 has no oomph to run an external 4K display (at more than 24 Hz, i.e. in usable mode). Broadwell and newer do have the capability to run 2 of them.
The CPUs got less power-hungry. You can do the same work with less juice, so your battery lasts longer.
The SSDs with the new interfaces got much faster. There is simply no comparison between M.2 nvme drive and SATA3 SSD.
Sadly, wifi took a step back, with almost universal unavailability of anything better than 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac. In the past, MIMO 3x3 used to be available (Broadcom, but the option was there).
So yes, modern laptop is significantly different experience than few years old one, despite the CPU having the same GHz.
My point is that they're not noticeably faster for the things most people use their computers for. They still run browsers, Spotify, email, word processors and all of that just fine and last "long enough" on a charge.
The improvements have been incredibly marginal for most people.
Also, they do not have a problem with Electron apps. for most people, they are just apps like anythig else, and do not perceive any performance problems with them.
And where did Electron apps come into the discussion?
Even the Apple 2015 M.2 drives, which are "only" AHCI, but with much deeper queue (i.e. nonstandard), can do 1.something GBps and the difference compared to standard SATA SSD is noticable by normal users.
Electron apps are something normal people use and some of them compain about the speed/lag/memory usage. Usually those with older computers, who think nothing changed in the last years ;).
If you do the first, you will do also the second. It makes a difference even when launching Excel or Firefox.
Between SATA SSD and PCIe? Sure, for extremely IO-heavy tasks there's a difference to be felt, but not really in everyday use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Linux could be the new Mac os X if all the Linux distributions chose to focus on one platform and way to do things, but nobody in the Linux world is going to do this.
Also, Mac has unified hardware, so they pretty much can optimize so that stuff Just Works.
The Dell XPS 13 is a good choice if you want something from a major manufacturer, but there are loads of smaller companies, too.
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.
And so therefore, no one else has either!
One of the big reasons Linux Desktop still sucks is the outright refusal of the community to acknowledge any of its problems.
How do you define "mainstream laptop"? Or is it a laptop that can run desktop Linux without problems?
There’s a lot of things I like about macOS [eg: better power management], but the main reason I switched was because it was a Unix I could put Photoshop and InDesign onto.
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.)
I usually use iTerm2 as well.
The web, Unix, Linux, OSX, pretty much everything other than Microsoft uses properly namespace driven forward-slash separated paths with no drives and case sensitivity.
That you can't fix, merely abstract it away. I am tired of mapping between the two.
scp myfile.txt winmachine:/d/Users/Whoever/Documents/Projects/X/File.txt
Or
scp myfile.txt linmachine:/home/whoever/documents/projects/x/file.txt
I'm a Unix user since about '93 for ref as well. I am poisoned with forward slashes everywhere :)
Name one that isn't just "Bourne Shell does it different".
I think the question is not whether someone would buy a MacBook because it has these tools built in but rather, why would someone buy Windoze given that it doesn't have these tools built in?
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.
While Microsoft has started doing good things which I can agree on, when did they lose OS market share to the point of not being number one? If we're talking about Apple hardware outselling any one vendor, that's true, but there's volume. Also, one of the first things I did after getting my MacBook Pro (and others I know who don't want to leverage VMs/Parallels. I like Windows and OSX being separate from a context point of view) was dual boot Windows.
Android is first by a large margin. iOS almost outnumbers Windows as well.
Microsoft post iPhone needs to prove that it's worth using a desktop at all, not that they deserve to have the highest share of desktop users. Stopping the bleeding inflicted by Macs, which sync so well with iOS, is part of that.
The number of people using Windows to do their "computer things" has gone down dramatically. Even if they have a Windows computer, much of the time spent doing computer things has moved to Android and iOS.
PuTTy is amazing, and my experience of using windows over the years would have been far worse without it.
However I do understand the point - compared to using a real terminal, it does indeed suck to be stuck on windows using PuTTy
For a terminal on windows, I have now taken to install cygwin, X on cygwin, and then xfce-terminal on top. It's not perfect either, but it is better.
I doubt Windows 10's inclusion of ssh alone addresses this use case; for that you'd want a full cygwin or something. I don't know anymore - I don't use Windows for any purpose other than games on dedicated gaming computers these days. Despite Apple going backwards with each successive macOS release (probably since 10.8) it's still a much more usable OS for the majority of the things I do than Windows 10. I do like Windows 10 better than Vista and 7, though, on my current gaming computer.
Not trying to be condescending, but it seems to need highlighting that just having SSH access isn't enough.
Not to mention that these other environments have offered other benefits [especially] to developers looking for a programming environment that works for them. The VS.Net IDE-play-button approach to automating testing and deployment doesn't scale for everybody.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/tabs-come-to-every-w...
> the people buying Macbooks, or using Linux directly [...]
... don't give two hoots about Powershell. Sorry, but I did limit what I was saying to describe people not using Windows.
PS: From the fact that you refer to Visual Studio as "VS.Net", I take it that you haven't been in Microsoftland for a while. No serious developer uses these "play-buttons" to do their automated testing and/or deployment.
It's been about a decade since I moved to Linux. Just skimming the latest VS docs though, the structure of unit testing within VS pretty identical to how it was. The feedback is a little more inline and I guess the extensions are a fairly big deal... But that sort of lends to my point that the IDE is still pushing itself down your throat for an IDE-centric build environment.
The thing I've liked about collaboration since moving away from VS is our build and testing toolchains sit completely separate from development settings and IDE projects. It's very simple to switch things out and script in new workflows. It also means we don't need to install things like VS to test on a new (eg rebuilt production test) machine.
I'm sure the same is possible in Microsoftland, I've just never —even recently, I still interact with .Net developers and their work product— seen people making use of it, falling back on what Mother thinks best. Maybe they're not serious enough developers.
The historical bias towards the IDE and component kits still exists —and probably will forever— but some of those things are reasons I found it so easy to pick and run with VB.NET and C#. I won't pretend it took me a while to work out what I was supposed to do when I left it all behind.
That all said, they are getting closer to the point (may be there already) where you can go from Powershell to remote Powershell over SSH.. But that still assumes you're lunatic enough to want to host anything on Windows. I think I've had too much freedom for too long now to ever consider that a good idea.
No, but something like installing putty was the last straw.
Putty is a terrible experience; very difficult to use. It's like every misstep or disconnection involves a dozen or so clicks back into the configuration area to "try again". This feels like normal on Windows though.
I recently tried to port my workflow to Windows for a year, but I eventually gave up simply because of something like this. I might've made it 6-7 months and I can't recall exactly where it was, death from a thousand cuts maybe.
Hat's off to you, I didn't even make it that many weeks.
Between filenames/paths being too long, poor terminals with janky colour schemes (save for Mobaxterm, it's great), WSL issues (like umask handling), gvim/vim issues with plugins, and loads of other annoying bits I just went back to Linux.
Linux is FAR from perfect, especially as I have an Nvidia graphics card, but there's a lot to like there too. Having run Fedora 27/Ubuntu 17.10 I've found I really really like Gnome. I seem to be in a club of one there (and it's buggy as hell on 17.10) but for me it's been great to use.
Not that I wouldn't use Mac if I found a couple grand down the back of the sofa, but as a daily driver Linux has been less painful. Even on the laptop, though I do have one of those Dell certified ones.
Normally you have a fully-fledged programming language that sometimes runs a command being SSH client, and universal one at that (you can pipe data through it, you can pipe data out of it, you can run remote commands non-interactively with it, you can jump through SSH on other hosts with it, you can set up TCP tunnels in ad-hoc manner without going through the configuration, and obviously you can run an interactive shell). Plus you get scp for file transfer out of the box, and lftp (which understands sftp protocol) and rsync after installing some barely related software, all of them still able to jump through other hosts.
Now compare it to the glorious ability to open a window with remote shell (and only direct one, no jumping through a bastion host), and maybe a TCP tunnel with some clicking through every single time (you can't recall the history of commands, because there was no command in the first place; the best you can do is to save the tunnel configuration permanently). And maybe file transfer if you remembered to download PuTTY's scp client.
You can do SSH proxying with PuTTY, too. It's just called something different:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28926612/putty-configura...
Plus PuTTY has a command line interface and everything. You can do all the things you mention with PuTTY from a cmd.exe or PowerShell prompt.
Using PuTTY or Mingw tools on Windows sucks compared to using them on a Unix-based system. I gotta say the Windows Subsystem for Linux really helps in that regard - as does native SSH in cmd an PowerShell (PowerShell by itself is also pretty awesome once you get the hang of it). Linux did not use to be such a great competitor for the rest of desktop usage (some will argue it still isn't).
Just install Ubuntu Shell.
Also, it's not like you don't need to install iTerm, zsh, docker, python libraries etc on mac. It's not like it comes with them by default. Your argument is kind of moot.
Mabye Homebrew, and its predecessors, were the real killer apps for mac?
cmd.exe and conhost.exe won't do the job.
Maybe I just don't remember installing it, but I think macs have zsh out-of-the-box too.
Depends, for the occasional deep into CLI world to run a script, is quite ok.
Granted, the defaults regarding mouse copy-paste and window size were only improved on Windows 10.
> Not to mention that since developers are only using Linux and Mac, you will have libraries which does not work on windows (because nobody even tried).
Not all developers are pure UNIX devs doing POSIXy stuff.
Why they're trying to replace it with Powershell rather than improving cmd.exe is silly, however.
However I do think it could have been made less verbose and dislike the ps1 extension, as the 1 (one) does not make sense.
For instance, "%" is an alias for ForEach-Object, "ls" for Get-ChildItem, etc. And you can of course define your own.
From the point of resourcing, I mean. Here we have Microsoft on a gazillion dollars of capital and one of the most critical tools for several people is developed by a single talented hobbyist who gives it for free.
And of course my next computer will be a MacBook again.
I'm one of these somebodies.
It's not that installing Putty is a hassle, but my choice to buy a MacBook was very heavily driven by the fact that macOS is Unix based. My time spent between Windows 10 and macOS is pretty even, but it is a much more enjoyable experience to develop in macOS partly because of the Unix-based shell.