I'm writing my own s/w to control test equipment, using gawk (GNU awk) scripts running on a laptop with Cygwin (Linux environment). Later, I'll move the s/w to a raspberry pi.
gawk is turning out (IMHO) to be brilliant for this application. It's a lot of fun, writing code, and seeing it work. I set up remote VPN access to the test equipment LAN, so from off-site I can start, stop, and monitor experiments as they run, or set them up for overnight operation.
If you like Linux, you can do all this yourself, if you want.