[EvanAnderson]

They purchased a reasonably nice POSIX environment when they bought Interix in 1999 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix). Interix was a lot of fun to use, and I really wish it still existed as a product. I used to have fanciful dreams of a POSIX-based Linux-like "distribution" of Windows that kept a lot of the things I like about the Windows NT environment (NTFS filesystem, kernel object manager, service control manager) but jettisoned those things I don't.

[YCOmega]

Yeah, it went through a pile of rebrands until Windows 8 when it ended up getting pulled in one of the preview releases IIRC. I've wanted similar to you just so that people could target some kinda baseline on Windows with FOSS.

I mean, I get that coming from the other direction, powershell seems like a nice treat. And if you use it, colour me impressed. I know in some cases, it's the only option for doing script work on Windows machines. But there is a much bigger and more sane ecosystem waiting if MS just rallied around SFU again. Probably cheaper too, tell the investors that.

[brazzledazzle]

>I mean, I get that coming from the other direction, powershell seems like a nice treat. And if you use it, colour me impressed. I know in some cases, it's the only option for doing script work on Windows machines.

Your dismissive attitude towards PowerShell makes me think you either haven't put much time into using it (if any) or haven't touched it since the 1.x days (even then the benefits over a string-based shell should have been obvious). It's a really good shell and is in a completely different league than sh/bash/zsh. It's not the best scripting language and there are still warts but until they make a solid and practical Ruby or Python based shell it's going to sit far and away from the rest.

If the many replies you've gotten haven't been enough motivation I encourage you to actually try it out for a while.

[YCOmega]

I don't know, most of the people who are replying seem to be quite rude about it. I certainly judge software by the community and I'd hate to need a question answered by them. /s

As for actually trying it... I'd love to, but every time I do I come up against limitations. Mostly because none of the projects I use write shell scripts for powershell.

But again, that doesn't justify PS being the only one that gets any official attention on Windows, hence me mentioning msys2 earlier.

[brazzledazzle]

I think the rudeness is mostly a response to what seemed like dismissiveness with an apparent lack of personal experience. I had a hard time containing my incredulousness as well to be honest.

As far as official attention goes, I think Microsoft is right to stay focused. Third parties can and should feel free to build their own solutions though.

[gfody]

I loved using SFU/Interix with Gentoo-prefix on XP and Win7 enterprise. I'm using Msys2 now and am pretty happy with it. There are mingw packages for practically everything but openssh is msys only. So this native openssh should give some speedup.