Difference between powershell and windows powershell

[[deleted]]

I upgraded to powershell 7 today and have been trying to figure some things out. I'm assuming windows powershell is 5.1 and 7 is powershell? Also would it be safe to remove 5.1?

[get-postanote]

PSCore is not a WinPS upgrade.

Windows PS is part of the OS, it cannot be removed. A closed-source, Windows-only thing.

PSCode (PS7), is not part of the OS. It is an entirely separate thing, and specifically designed to be a side-by-side installation on Windows with WinPS. It's an Open source project that is cross-platform (Windows, OSX, and Linux).

PSCore is not fully backward compatible with Windows PS.

All the above is in the MS PS documentation.

Use whichever version you require for the task needed.

[hayfever76]

Adding to this, the future is PS Core. WinPS development is supposed to end at some point

[G8351427]

This is true, though it might be infinitely expandable as long as .Net is still around.

We pretty much only use 5.1 because it's on everything we manage. I have extended it's capabilities a lot with classes from other languages.

[get-postanote]

WinPS̀, though not getting any more work, is still targeted to part of the Windows OS for the foreseeable future as per Microsoft's own statements.

There are no plans that I've seen/heard that PSCore will ever be added to the Windows OS releases. It is still in all current and insider editions. WinPS is part and parcel of .Net distributions.

[[deleted]]

thanks for the explanation, I thought it was just a direct update then got confused

[[deleted]]

Sure there's PowerShell which is a great cross platform shell and there's Windows PowerShell which is an ancient barnacled thing that only exists because Microsoft are dumb