this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Looks like it's taken a page from PowerShell in passing structured data rather than just text.
Yeah, it has. I think they started out as loving the concepts of PowerShell but hating the implementation, combined with the fact that PowerShell is clearly a Windows-first shell and doesn't work so well on other OSes (it surprised me a lot to find out that PowerShell even has support for linux).
nu
tries to implement these concepts in a way that's more universal and can work equally well on Linux, macOS or Windows.Powershell works really well on other OSs now. I use it on MacOS and Linux daily. I might loath MS but Powershell is a fantastic shell and after working with an object-oriented shell I hate going back to anything else.
Oh I didn't know powershell did that too! It sure beats endless parsing errors
That was the foundational concept in powershell; everything is an object. They then went a ruined it with insane syntax and a somewhat logical, but entirely ~~in practice~~impractical verb-noun command structure.
Nushell is powershell for humans. And helps that it runs across all systems. It’s one of the first things I install.
That's supposed to be "impractical", not "in practice", for others reading along.
For example, the "proper" command to list a directory is:
Get-ChildItem
The "proper" command to fetch a webpage is:
Invoke-WebRequest https://example.com/
In these particular cases, they do have aliases defined, so you can use
ls
,dir
andcurl
instead, but ...yeah, that's still generally what the command names are like.It's partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages out there. I genuinely feel like this kind of defeats the point of having a scripting language in the first place, when it isn't succinct.
Like, you're hardly going to use it interactively, because it is so verbose, so you won't know the commands very well. Which means, if you go to write a script with Powershell, you'll need to look up how to do everything just as much as with a full-fledged programming language. And I do typically prefer the better tooling of a full-fledged programming language...