There is no analogy to putty on a Unix platform, because its not just implementing the console interface, its also the SSH implementation as well, on Unix systems, its pretty easy to write a fully functioning terminal, because your just hooking into the existing pty system, so all you need to do is write (or borrow) a competent vt100 emulation, and make a UI.

PuTTY is great, honestly. It's not pretty, but neither is the windows console nor PowerShell.

It's an ssh client. It is robust, easy to install and it works well.

How much energy do you expect me to waste evaluating and choosing new ones when the one I have works just fine the way it is? I have better things to be doing.

This is the poison in the open source world. If you have something that works "well enough" but never evolves, it holds everyone back. The barrier to entry is fairly high for an application like this, so I'm not saying this is an easy thing to fix, but it's worth fixing.

Linux in particular is filled with "well enough" solutions that should be striving to be better. Although there's misfires when controversial things like systemd happen, there has been steady improvement in other areas. Imagine if Nginx had never happened, if NCSA httpd was "good enough"?

The Windows user base deserves better than PuTTY.

But whats wrong with PuTTY?, is it missing features?, I mean. like it has full SSH support, its easy to use, and has a non-quirky terminal emulator.. I guess it could have more terminal types, but there are closed source options for that, like Reflections.

Mostly it seems like overkill to run a ssh server + client to get a local terminal.