R0b0t1
06-22-2017, 07:17 AM
Does anyone have any recommended programs? I find myself interacting with an increasing number of Windows machines and there's a growing list of programs I want but can't easily use. I don't exactly know what to ask for because most of my knowledge doesn't translate well to Windows. If possible I would like suggestions to be open source.
What I tend to use right now:
Cygwin (https://www.cygwin.com/), notably its SSH daemon,
RDPWrap (https://github.com/stascorp/rdpwrap),
MinGW-w64 (https://mingw-w64.org/doku.php), and
VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox).
What is missing:
A bunch of command line programs that don't make sense even with Cygwin (e.g. they manage resources that Windows controls, or interact with X11);
program(s) to gather process and hardware statistics like "ps" or "htop;"
program(s) to display that information in an interactive fashion (I know of https://www.rainmeter.net/, let me know if there are others);
program(s) to manage windows on the desktop with hotkeys, like a tiling window manager;
LVM and software RAID;
automatic deployment and installation;
a Bash-like shell (with features like tab completion) that is better integrated with the OS; and
a lot of the virtual machine functionality that QEMU offers. Some of it is available via Hyper-V (e.g. GPU passthrough) but Hyper-V is very hard to use from its GUI. There are apparently PowerShell bindings, but I was never able to find documentation for them.
Again, the above is me trying to fit Windows into the mold of Linux. If there's better programs or things I haven't thought of I would like those things to be suggested as well.
There's some things I want to do - like automatically set up Windows VM images - that seems like it can only be done with Microsoft tools. I technically know the solution but want to know anything you might be able to add about actually using those things, because I never really figured them out well.
What I tend to use right now:
Cygwin (https://www.cygwin.com/), notably its SSH daemon,
RDPWrap (https://github.com/stascorp/rdpwrap),
MinGW-w64 (https://mingw-w64.org/doku.php), and
VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox).
What is missing:
A bunch of command line programs that don't make sense even with Cygwin (e.g. they manage resources that Windows controls, or interact with X11);
program(s) to gather process and hardware statistics like "ps" or "htop;"
program(s) to display that information in an interactive fashion (I know of https://www.rainmeter.net/, let me know if there are others);
program(s) to manage windows on the desktop with hotkeys, like a tiling window manager;
LVM and software RAID;
automatic deployment and installation;
a Bash-like shell (with features like tab completion) that is better integrated with the OS; and
a lot of the virtual machine functionality that QEMU offers. Some of it is available via Hyper-V (e.g. GPU passthrough) but Hyper-V is very hard to use from its GUI. There are apparently PowerShell bindings, but I was never able to find documentation for them.
Again, the above is me trying to fit Windows into the mold of Linux. If there's better programs or things I haven't thought of I would like those things to be suggested as well.
There's some things I want to do - like automatically set up Windows VM images - that seems like it can only be done with Microsoft tools. I technically know the solution but want to know anything you might be able to add about actually using those things, because I never really figured them out well.