Hacker News Reader

Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

I made a wrong statement. PowerShell is a great shell! I want a shell and gnu chain from coreutils onwards within Windows. Babun takes me close, but not close enough. Namely it's slow as hell, 64-bit is no really there, and it's cygwin. I'm one of those "runs Vim and writes their own Makefiles and uses GCC and stuff like that doesn't like cygwin" guys.

View on HN

I see. I'm also kinda a "runs Vim and writes Makefiles" guy, but I'm more hopeful about the Ubuntu layer being more seamlessly integrated into the native rather than waiting for Cygwin to improve. After all, WSL is official, and Microsoft seems to put a lot of efforts into it.

As a side note, like you said, Cygwin is slow. I once measured how much time compiling things consumed on both Cygwin/MSYS2 and WSL. `./configure` was 3 times faster on WSL, and `make` was 2 times faster. I assume the reason to be WSL's process management being lighter. This is another reason I'm looking forward to see the improvements to WSL's native integration.

Then why not run your favorite *nix and stick windows in a VM for the few applications that don't support Linux?

Great question. I use, all the time, applications which need full speed and full GPU support of which some are only on Linux and some are only on Windows and there's some overlap where most from both are on MacOS. Simple VM doesn't cut it, I've tried.

What about the other way around, Windows host + *nix VMs? I run FreeBSD in VirtualBox, forwarding apps to VcXsrv via PuTTY. Works very well. I even made a tray icon script to launch that setup https://github.com/myfreeweb/xvmmgr/blob/master/xvmmgr.psm1 :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com