If by "SSH clients" you mean terminal emulators, the answer to

> but how many of them are also telnet and serial terminal clients as well?

is "all of them", and they all support way more such things than PuTTY too. I think what you're used to (e.g. the GUI rather than command line switches) is the only thing that counts here, as PuTTY is inferior in almost every other way.

Terminal emulators, in my experience, are not sufficient to establish connections to serial devices on their own, especially not through the GUI. PuTTY does that without me having to look through a man page or --help dump or, as is more often the case, StackOverflow.

I mean SSH clients. Terminal emulators don't do SSH on their own either.

> PuTTY is inferior in almost every other way.

Not in any way that has ever mattered to me.

Sorry if I came off a bit harsh. There is no problem with using PuTTY if it works for you and is what you're used to. If you're interested in learning more terminal stuff, you may be able to better for your purposes. Infodump follows.

A terminal emulator is the interface through which you access programs like SSH clients and Telnet clients, much like a web browser is an interface through which you access videos, news, etc., so it doesn't make much sense to talk about what it does on its own - it exists to run other programs.

Technically, any program on Linux can access serial devices; even basic commands like cp and cat can talk usefully to serial devices for some simple purposes (e.g. short plotter drawings can just be sent to the serial port with cat, and my plotter will draw them - drawings bigger than the plotter's buffer need something a little more sophisticated).

PuTTY bundles together a terminal emulator, SSH client, and Telnet client. When you connect to something it's running the appropriate client in its terminal emulator. It's not an SSH client that supports Telnet, and its terminal emulator doesn't do SSH on its own (e.g. mintty is based on PuTTY's terminal emulator, without the SSH client).

I know what a terminal emulator is. I have been using Linux off and on in various roles for over 20 years now.

Having a dev node serial device isn't very helpful in itself if you can't easily set the baud rate and other parameters when doing I/O.

Linux Desktop might be more popular if it didn't have such condescending advocates.

The one I use for quick one of conectios is:

screen /dev/ttyS1 300

or

screen /dev/ttyS0 300,cs8

My cheatsheet: screen /dev/ttySX baud_rate,cs8|cs7,ixon|-ixon,ixoff|-ixoff,istrip|-istrip

But I am heavy screen/tmux user so its natural to me.

*I believe GTKTerm has GUI for setting that up

I'm sorry to have offended you. My comment got plenty of upvotes, so it was appreciated by its intended audience.

It is easy to set baud rate and other parameters with stty, but I'll stop trying to be helpful now.

Er, but putty is available natively on Linux?

Yeah, seems to have Linux, Mac and Windows versions... That's.. Odd?

It is? When did that happen?

Edit: Actually I apparently already knew this since the Linux laptop next to me has PuTTY native on it. I don't know why I had included it in my mental list of things I always install WINE for.