Weird question, but I'm pretty close to my wits end here. And while I know that this isn't a technical support forum it might be interesting for others.

I'm in a bit of a bind, for the passed few years I've been deploying many hundreds (often multiple thousands) of Windows instances;

I'm in infrastructure, not directly software engineering and so far I've been able to get away with trial and error deployment, but the iteration time is very high and I can't easily run things like integration tests because infrastucture code is so "protocol-buffer to protocol buffer" I'd end up writing much more mock/stubs and glue that the test wouldn't be valid anyway.

What have I tried:

I have an IntelliJ license, I've been trying to get their remote development working but it's pretty obviously exclusively for targeting POSIX machines. Even installing SSH on Windows causes it to start complaining about common unix/linux utilities not being available.

I tried VSCode and it's very similar.

I recently discovered Theia which is a editor that you can access from a browser (from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22888604 ) and after spending some time actually getting it working: while it looks like vscode it is not. There's no plugins and no integration with pydb, it's also hugely janky on Windows.

"code-server" (https://github.com/cdr/code-server) (which runs much like Theia) also only works on Linux/MacOS

and "Visual studio online" seems like it was designed (like IntelliJ) to be run from Windows with Linux as a remote target: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/visual-studio-online/

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I run Linux (or MacOS) personally and would strongly prefer not to have to run Windows because the majority of my other tools (git-crypt, terraform, gnupg, ssh) are better supported on Linux and anyway I prefer i3 to Windows..

Does anyone have an ideas?