This is a great discussion from everyone! I have learned a lot about Powershell here, so thank you!
That said, the comparison to a homogenous windows env and a mixed flavor linux environment is disingenuous. Using multiple flavors of linux is just multiple OSes, of which Windows would be another. The best advice here is to stick to one flavor of linux, which should be possible because there are no licensing fees!
There is an often overlooked downside to “options”: it means that even well-meaning people will pick inconsistent things unless ruthlessly forced into compliance.
Single-choice vendors like Microsoft or Apple remove this variability, which is a big benefit at the scale of large enterprise or “entire ecosystems”.
Linux is too flexible, and the inevitable consequence of this is that I have customers that each have a dozen incompatible variations in production.
Even if each customer had precisely one version of one distro, my scripts wouldn’t be safely portable between them if they don’t happen to pick the same distro!
I’ve got decade-old complex PowerShell scripts I’ve reused across a dozen unrelated customers. That’s a significant benefit.
People do standardise on a distro within companies though (I made this point to you elsewhere too the last time you claimed otherwise).
And it’s not like Microsoft doesn’t change things around between different releases of Windows. I’ve ran into just as many compatibility issues with edge case software between different versions of Windows as I have with Linux. The key is just understanding the base of your OS as well as your software. This is as true for Windows as it is Linux.
And I have Bash scripts written in the 90s, before Powershell was even a thing, that still work now. In fact one of the biggest complaints about POSIX is the age of the specification. So it’s strange that you’re talking about Powershell as if it’s unique in its compatibility promise.
I’m honestly questioning just how much experience you have in this field because you talk as if everyone misunderstands Windows yet then go on to make the exact same misconceptions about Linux (and POSIX in general).
That said, the comparison to a homogenous windows env and a mixed flavor linux environment is disingenuous. Using multiple flavors of linux is just multiple OSes, of which Windows would be another. The best advice here is to stick to one flavor of linux, which should be possible because there are no licensing fees!