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seriously outside of Microsoft's core enterprise IT management – documentation is non-existent, hard to find, out of date, incomplete, etc.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.