Powershell. Yea it looks different than bash but it's great.

But RDP solves different problems. I do UI development and use RDP to connect to my work box from home. It's also used on Windows Server for Citrix-type scenarios.

Comparing powershell to a UNIX command line is like bringing a tricycle to the Tour de France.

Passing strongly typed objects between processes seems better than text and streams, if only for auto complete.

That part is great. The problem with Powershell is that Windows doesn't have a culture of using the shell in general or it being an area developers should be good at, whereas Unix inherits half a century of a shell being the primary means to control a system. This shows painfully any time you try to use PowerShell seriously outside of Microsoft's core enterprise IT management – documentation is non-existent, hard to find, out of date, incomplete, etc. while many applications either don't support it at all or expose only limited functionality, and so forth.

I think Niels had it exactly backwards: PowerShell is like taking your bike from the Tour de France and trying to ride through a rural area with no roads. All of the advanced technology doesn't help if you're trying to do something which just isn't commonly done there.

The thing which I think will change that is Azure – almost any time I see someone mention using PowerShell for real work, it involves Azure and that seems likely to continue improving as people start doing the hybrid cloud model. It's one thing to click around in a GUI when you periodically setup a few gigantic servers or deploy every 3 months but it's quite a different world when you are talking about running a dozen cloud servers for 3 hours.

The good news is that there is a Microsoft directive that major Microsoft software should come powershell admin tools.

I think a lot of config gui's now just execute powershell underneath.

Most of the stuff that comes out of azure UI just runs powershell stuff. The release flow for new features tends to be powershell private preview -> general availability of commandlets -> UI full release. Most of the Azure stack has extra features that are never really ported to the UI.

Hopefully they'll be able to shift the culture to the point where enterprise IT managers start writing that into purchase requirements. That could make lives better for a lot of Windows admins very quickly.

I don't like the powershell, and even I know that's an absurdly unfair bias.

Very true, but I suspect you're mapping them the opposite way.

Back in the 1990s we had X Windows in our computer lab and it was routine to run an app on one Sun workstation and interact with it on another. This "just worked" with Linux and in 1995 I was laughing at RDP and crashy Windows 95 and NT.

Around that time KDE rocked the world with a beta release desktop that "almost works" but since then the Linux desktop has stagnated rather than advanced.

To the best of my recollection, Windows 95 didn't have RDP at all. Neither did NT (<=4) except for Terminal Services Edition, and even then it was pretty good for its day.

This all said by me, who was a full-time Linux/Solaris (and X) user who was involved with Windows as part of my day job.

Back then we were trying to get a Windows NT network to behave more like a traditional Unix cluster so we were messing around with Terminal Services and other work-arounds that didn't quite work at that time.

RDP solves problems way outside that use case. The upcoming ssh native ssh server looks nice, but RDP exists for working with GUI applications. Windows' rasion d'etre is, well, Windowed applications as a alterntive to the command line stuff that ruled in the 1980s in business, so its no surprise that even its server end is largely graphical, at least from a legacy perspective. MS is pushing powershell admin tools very hard in its own products and encouraging other vendors to do so.

From the CLI, I get by with psexec and the standard windows command line tools, many of which are fairly powerful and "good enough" for Windows administration even before ps existed. I manage roughly 100 windows PCs this way without issue. Group Policy is also hard to beat. 90% of our administration is done just with GPO's. The PCs and servers are automatically configured from soup to nuts once they join the domain. Changes are trivial to make and percolate to all systems. Its actually quite pleasant.

In the linux world, this is all a PITA as the CLI doesn't really help with with Windowed userland issues (firefox looks funny, cant click on something, etc). NX helps but generally we just used third-party remote stuff. VNC is a massive security hole that should never be used. Nowadays, this isn't even a concern as the linux desktop is pretty dead in my industry. OSX ate whatever goodwill it had for most.

And I wish there was a proper desktop for Linux and OS X - but there's not. I'm guessing this is the right place for that complaint?

Speaking of RDP though, I have yet to find a remote screen sharing tool that is as polished and that works as well on Unix as RDP does on Windows. I'd really like to be able to use something other than VNC to remote into my Mac from Windows.

NoMachine's solution comes close, but is still not as robust over flakey connections as RDP. I've yet to experience the kind of tolerance to slow/poor connections I get with RDP over NoMachine when run over either a very spotty cellular Internet connection (3G-grade will really point this out) and over an airliner's satellite Internet connection. As odd as it may seem, when I want a solid X11 experience over a flaky Internet connection, I spin up an X11 window server on a Windows desktop, and RDP into that desktop session. RDP degrades much more gracefully than the Unix-based options, and isn't as aggressive with timing out and breaking the connection.

I also looked at the SPICE protocol and its implementations [1], but again the user experience is poor over slow/flaky connections compared to RDP. The compact RDP data stream also makes it a good starting point for developing various RDP-based recorders.

In my opinion, RDP is a much-overlooked feature of Windows, and its superior implementation to any Unix alternatives I'm aware of is one of the reasons I still run some Windows instances in my environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE_%28protocol%29

NoMachine offers two methods when delivering a remote Linux/Unix desktop: 1) NX in 'lightweight mode', mainly using advanced compression and caching of the X11 protocol and 2) NX using hardware accelerated video encoding and decoding.

The first method is the preferred option when connecting to legacy X11 applications, i.e. applications making mostly use of traditional X11 Render operations and X11 vector graphics. In this 'lightweight mode' NX reduces both the bandwidth usage and the HW requirements on the client and the server to the very minimum, by employing the expensive video encoding operations only when detecting that the server-side application is producing video data on the screen.

Unfortunately this 'lightweight mode' can't deliver games, a Mac or Windows desktop, as well as most contemporary Unix/Linux desktop environments. The reason, in the latter case, is the inefficient way these applications use the X11 protocol, as well as the inability of the X11 protocol to deal with modern graphics. In these cases, the use of video encoding is unavoidable. NX employs a number of different techniques to reduce the CPU consumption and the bandwidth needed, so much to often make video encoding advantageous even compared to the legacy X11 protocol compression. But, of course, the final results always depend on the screen content being deployed.

Disclaimer: I work for NoMachine

Thank you for the clarification, that helps explain a lot. Next time I fly and/or hit a 3G area I'll try running the older X Window manager fvwm v2.x under NoMachine and compare to the RDP-based results. I'd really prefer to work with NoMachine because it preserves my Linux- and BSD-based stack, so if it works as well as RDP I'll try to remember to post back here my results.

I agree. VNC is a great hack, but it is a hack.

Windows RDP has been amazing for modern desktops. Prior to having over 8GB RAM and an SSD drive, I would often access Windows from by Mac via RDP. Since I am mostly Mac OS X, Linux or Windows visualized on my Mac these days, I seldom use it RDP, but I am always amazed at how responsive it is compared to VNC.

The best remote desktop I have used was Timbuktu for Mac back in the early 90's. At that time, Timbuktu was able to utilize the Mac's great support for 1-bit (black/white) and other low-bit graphics modes, and you could have a very good remote experience even at high display resolutions via a 14.4kbps modem. Putting Mac OS X into gray scale mode helps, a little but VNC performance still sucks.

I also remember seeing an amazing demo of a NeXT system that was able to push its Display Postscript based terminals to remote systems. Alas, Apple lost that when Display Postscript was replaced by PDF.