I'm interested now that PowerShell is cross platform. For someone reasonably fluent in bash/zsh (and Python, etc.) already, could someone give examples of where they might use PowerShell?

http://nushell.sh/ is an example of a new (non-POSIX) shell that's trying to be more structured, similar to PowerShell. Thanks to nu's new -c option, it's possible to use nu profitably even if you don't make it your shell. I doubt I'd ever use PowerShell as my system shell on Mac/Linux, but I don't want to close myself off from tools that might be useful for particular tasks or scripts.

For instance, it's not straightforward to take a database or XLS document of users and transform that into an Active Directory implementation.

Here is a tool that would help with that: https://github.com/dsccommunity/ActiveDirectoryDsc

Normally you would need to run this on a Windows machine ... but now I am excited at the thought of using it from my mac.

I'm in the middle of doing a rollout of new network infrastructure, VPN, Firewall appliance, Hyper-V hosts, Active Directory, O365 sync, File storage, etc... for small/medium sized business. I am primarily a software/ops consultant, so I like to build infrastructure 'as data' and then use that data to assert the real thing. IE, terraform apply.

tl;dr – with cross platform we're closer to bringing modern ops tools into Windows land which is exciting. WSL is useful when you are on a Win box, but if you are trying to build infra from Linux/macOS you are struggling.

Here is a big list of powershell crap I have starred recently on Github:

- https://github.com/dsccommunity/ActiveDirectoryDsc (linked above)

- https://github.com/rmbolger/Posh-ACME

- https://github.com/DrEmpiricism/Optimize-Offline (not relevant to cross platform)

- https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 (not relevant to cross platform)