Was there a problem installing Putty?

Yes. Putty.

Strange. I never had a problem with it 10 years ago. Perhaps our expectations for a terminal have changed in that time.

Putty works fine. You can even do x11 forwarding or socks proxing. If you have an x11 server running on your machine you can have a linux display.

Putty's been being distributed over unsecured HTTP for years - I wouldn't be surprised if some companies' IT departments forbid it.

The main page [0] and main download [1] are HTTPS. GPG signatures are provided as well.

[0] https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.ht...

[1] https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/w64/putty-64bit-...

That probably changed just recently.

Downloading something over HTTPS doesn't magically make it secure.

I did out of irritation the nth time I wanted to delete a file that it insisted was open (which should not be a problem anyway).

>(which should not be a problem anyway).

But it is a problem. And also a difference in philosophy. NTFS gives the user and the process the guarantee that the filesystem will remain consistent. Also as a user, I have a guarantee that the file I have open, represents a file that actually exists on the file system, and not a deleted file.

This is not relevant to the on-disk filesystem, just how the OS handles files.

The philosophy is also flawed: open a file, then create a hard link to it. You now can't delete that hard link (because the file is open), even though you just created it. This is not a problem on POSIX because it correctly distinguishes a file name (represented by a directory entry) from a file (represented by the inode).

Its not clear to me what "flaw" you're referring to. NTFS is reference counted and can easily accommodate other behaviors. By default, it prevents deletion, unless a process specifically permits deletion, in which case, the file can be deleted.

This makes a whole lot of sense to me as a user, because I don't want to worry about open files being possibly deleted from disk.

>open a file, then create a hard link to it. You now can't delete that hard link (because the file is open), even though you just created it. This is not a problem on POSIX because it correctly distinguishes a file name (represented by a directory entry) from a file (represented by the inode).

This is not relevant to the topic.

It is absolutely relevant. In your very comment, you are confusing what a file and a file name is.

To rephrase: just because the FILE is open, doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to remove a FILE NAME that references the FILE.

> as a user, because I don't want to worry about open files being possibly deleted from disk

Open files can still usually be renamed (and moved across the same volume), so a file name of an open file can still be effectively removed.

Nothing like not being able to delete a directory because Explorer is keeping the folder's thumbnail database open and in use even though you are no longer in the directory.

The case where you can actually know why is the best one. More often than not there is no obvious reason why the damn thing is open.