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Comment by aruggirello | Hacker News Reader

> how different is that ... I use it daily and don't know what half of them do.

knowing what the other half does is usually a couple clicks away on the web, a 'man ...' away in the terminal, sources are usually available at a similar distance, and most of these services can be stopped and (forever?) disabled with a 'systemctl stop/disable ...' (you might even go the extra step and apt remove them). Trimming down stuff that you know you don't need is a pleasure (assuming you know what you're doing), and the end result is a leaner, faster system. Eg. after I installed AnyDesk, I didn't like that it started with the system (I'm paranoid, and I'm only using it occasionally), so I systemctl disabled it. This doesn't stop me from using it when I need (that is, to assist others. In the rare events when I need remote access to my system, I just use a reverse SSH tunnel, which is more practical for me)

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You can lookup what processes on windows do as well. You won't get the sources for them usually, but that's what you get for choosing a closed source OS. Similar for disabling them. Since you mention AnyDesk: at least on Windows it also comes as a single portable executable which needs no installation nor extra services i.e. only runs when started manually.

> You can lookup what processes on windows do as well.

What does svchost do?

It's a host for other services. Point-and-click way to find out which one: right-click in task manager and 'Go to service'.

I'm not sure it's that simple. One of the things in my process list is "Service Host: Server". That's so generic I can't even properly google it. One of the answers I found was "A server is an application which serves functionality to other network participants."

In services.msc you get a description: takes care of file and printer sharing and the likes. Otherwise you look for "what does windows server service do?"

you can also do tasklist /svc in a command prompt to get a list of svchosts.exes, pids and the services they are running.

Yup. I wondered what the PS equivalent was. So, figure out which WMI class one needs:

    Get-CimClass | ?{$_ -match 'service'}

ok, 'Win32_service' it is, could've guessed that :) Then:

    $svc - Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_service

what can we do with this?

    $svc | Get-Member

Lots of options, get some to see if it's what is needed:

    $svc | Select-Object -Property Name, PathName, ServiceType | Format-Table

Ok, looks like we need PathName. Sum up and list svchost processes including full descption like the one in services.msc:

    $svc | ?{$_.PathName -match 'svchost.exe'} | Select-Object -Property Name, PathName, Description | Format-Table

Or even easier, in the process manager. Just right click -> Go to Service.

That just tells you the service name; i.e. 'Server', which doesn't tell a lot in this case. services.msc has a more elaborate description.

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