I use fish via konsole however I still use bash as my login shell for stability reasons.
The idea of someone using powershell when you are on Linux is a form of self harm and you need to reach out as its clearly a cry for help.
Honest question: why?
Because, as someone who dislikes MS as much as possible, Powershell is one of the few things they done right :) And when you manage mostly Windows servers and a few Linux servers, why not choose a solution that works on both platforms? And yes, perl, python, ruby, they all work on Windows too, but its just not comparable to powershell on Windows.
So i can understand why someone asks this question :)
Personally, i keep them both seperated, powershell on Windows, bash on Linux. But i can understand why someone might choose to go “powershell all the way” :)
Powershell is a better language but is absolutely dogshit for interactive use IME. It's SO wordy and the excessive use of camelCase is annoying and I yearn for simple GNU coreutils every time I touch it. Like, give me tail -f please, why does cat also have a -Wait option or whatever the fuck
Why not? It seems like a well supported shell on windows that isn't terrible.
It seems like a well supported shell on windows
But you aren't using Windows. You're also now adding a .NET Core requirement for any Linux box wanting to use it. That means limited functionality as its not the full blown .NET framework. So, compared to something like bash, you now have added requirements with less functionality.
To answer your original question though, a lot of people prefer zsh as its got a crazy amount of customization you can do. People also like fish due to it being very friendly and interactive.
limited functionality as it’s not the full blown .NET
This is misleading to the point of being completely wrong
On Linux, you do not have access to Windows UI frameworks like WinForms, the Windows registry, and to System.Drawimg (because it is just a thin wrapper over Win32). Essentially the entire .NET standard library is available on Linux.
I would argue that .NET is actually better on Linux for some things (like web dev).
That said, I can see no reason to use PowerShell on Linux unless you are a .NET dev.
There are PowerShell cmdlets that do not work on Linux. Again, mostly stuff that talks to explicitly Windows services and sub-systems. But that has nothing to do with .NET at all. Also, path separators and case sensitivity is different on Linux. So, cross-platform scripting is a pain.
I've once created a profile with about 1500 lines of code for powershell, managing AD at work. It was great to learn, it's great for scripting and it's very intuitive (for me at least), I also liked working with objects.
I wouldn't use it on Linux though, I'm not sure how well integrated it is.
I'm using fish at the moment, desktop and server, and I like it primarily for the functions and the autocomplete
bash is also well supported in Windows via WSL
Development. Azure especially.
I didn't know you could use it on Linux. I'd consider it because I've used it at work for years and my experience with bash is far more limited. Powershell is pretty damn intuitive. I've gotten a lot further with it than I have any other scripting language.
i’m a big nushell fan.
i was once sitting where you are. when PowerShell was released on Linux i thought about switching and read the manual. i really liked some of the philosophy:
cat and ls have canonical short names to save disk space on the systems they were created for. this is no longer a constraint and aliasing a longer command name is better than “git gud n00b” when it comes to discoverability.—format=json or whatever.i looked around at a few solutions. xonsh uses Python. eshell is integrated into emacs and uses Elisp. i briefly tried to hack something together using Kotlin Script. and yeah, i tried PowerShell.
i settled on nushell not just because it fulfilled the above requirements, but also:
jq and other such tools are made irrelevant because you just load it into nushell query with a unified DSL using common syntax like select and where.honestly, these are the killer features. there are so many more. context aware autocomplete, modules and overlays, super easy custom completions, extension functions (one of my favorites is git remote open), cross platform (if you’re forced to use Windows), plugins, and i can contribute since i do Rust development for work.
give PowerShell a shot, but i think nushell is the happy medium
Hi! I'm interested in trying Nushell at some point, although I keep putting it off...
Would you share your experience on a couple of items?
grep or awk?sure!
bash commands in because && isn’t supported, multiline strings don’t require the \ character, and string escaping is totally different. those are intentional deviations that i personally agree with, but they take some getting used to. and then obviously stuff that is specific to nushell like working with tables.k8s connect (helm stage dev.0) which reads my YAML config and connects to the cluster specified in that file. or making a call to our internal package store to get the latest version by parsing the returned JSON.PATH (or Path if you’re nasty). you can just drop into it and it will have all the path stuff inherited just like if you launched zsh or bash. you’ll have to set that up if you want to use it as a system shell—like i do—, but otherwise it’s pretty seemless.you can check out my collection of scripts here: https://github.com/covercash2/dotfiles/tree/main/nuenv
ETA: if you do have compatibility problems or need your old muscle memory to do something quick, it’s easy enough to use bash -c old_script.sh or just drop into a different shell
Thanks a lot! This might just be enough to get me to actually try it!
Finally! Nushell is awesome. The infrequent deprecations are a bit annoying, but I prefer them to having a bad program go 1.0
zsh and oh-my-zsh :)
I use fish
Not that kind of "use!"
Does zsh count?
I use fish, but only interactively. Scripts are either in bash or Python depending om what I need.
I use fish, mostly because it is the default on CachyOS
At work we use it sometimes on Linux because we maintain a script that needs to work on multiple platforms, ps1 did that in this usecase better.
Came down to ps1 on Linux was better and more predictable than bash on windows.
Sadly.
No.
I usually just use Bash; there’s a certain level of complexity where it begins to be more reasonable to just use Python.
I use fish, I had to learn some new syntax and modify some functions since it's not POSIX-compliant, but it was pretty painless.
I use both fish and zsh
somehow
I use Linux to get away from PowerShell 😂 I did try zsh though, it was nice, maybe give it a shot.
Only when I'm doing MS shit for work. Otherwise I find it kind of a pain. I get that some of it's ideas are nice, but functionally it doesn't actually do anything for me on unixy systems that bash doesn't so I don't. I'm not going to install it on all my servers so using it for scripting doesn't make sense and I do more Linux admin than MS.
i ws forced to do it recently and noticed that they enforce usage of black terminal, like it is in the command prompt in windows.
it was a pain in the ass to keep switch colors just to touch that one powershell module and my first priority to replacing with with a python equivalent. they still think that the powershell module is being used, but it's no longer capable of working in this environment and they're going to have to spend $$$ to make it useable because i forsee LOT of difficulty and delays in bringing it up to spec.
At work I use powershell to ssh into Linux boxes fairly regularly.
I used to use fish but I'm learning Unix right now and am trying to use only defaults so I can learn freebsd the way it exists on a dvd
If you are using FreeBSD, you are probably using the Almquist Shell.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almquist_shell
BSD has not used Bourne since the 90’s. Bash is of course the “Bourne Again Shell”.
For Linux fans, “dash” is the (Debian Almquist Shell). It is the Linux version of the BSD shell. Dash is the default /usr/bin/sh in Debian and Ubuntu I think. So, pretty close to the same shell as FreeBSD.
Nope, I've tried it before but I prefer the muscle memory of bash/zsh.
I'll use it on Windows though.
I didn't know powershell was an option on Linux.
It's an option. Every other option is better, but it's a brochure entry; and an option.
It is not always Bash. Zsh comes as a default with some Arch based distros like Manjaro (xfce) and Garuda, plus Kali of course. But what is the point to use PowerShell in Linux? .. Azure, Exchange or Windows servers or something else I don't get?
Basically no one is using powershell on Linux. zsh is popular and i'm using fish.
I use it for some things. It's good for file batch processing, for example. I could probably do those things in python but I use C# and powershell at work so I know .net better.
I use powershell for some scripting. I've been using .net/powershell forever and I know it better than python. If bash can't handle it in a few lines, and I don't have to use python, I'll go powershell.
Zsh is nice, particularly with a couple of plugins
Fish is the cachyos default, I used oh my zsh too, I honestly cant tell a difference as a non dev end user
only for extraordinarily cursed situations where games need it in wine/proton
I use PowerShell on Linux for work stuff. We maintain a set of Azure deployment scripts that were originally developed on PS 4 and 5 for Classic Azure. They’ve been migrated to AzureRM and now PS Core and Az. The scripts are now fully cross-platform.
We even use some PS remoting over SSH for remotely deploying stuff on Linux VMs where we run some bash commands for configuration.
I started with bash scripting years ago and never really used PS for Windows or exchange server admin. Just in the last decade for Azure stuff.
Sounds weird and horrible but it’s fine.
Bash is still home
It's not my default shell on most of my servers but I use it all the time. I'm just not a fan of treating everything as a stream of text to grep, trim and sort into structured data that's easier to work with. Plus, cross platform. I've tried nushell a bit but I always go back to PowerShell.
nushell is pretty cool
My producer and I personally use Bash. We tried zsh, but that didn't treat us very well. Fish is actually pretty nice, though.
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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