Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by jongalloway2 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

jongalloway2·

What are your main uses for Cygwin as opposed to just using WSL / Bash on Windows?

View on HN

Any 32-bit edition of Windows, or being stuck on a pre-Win 10 version (corporate desktop, for example).

Personally I prefer to wrap Cygwin in http://www.msys2.org/ these days, which gives me pacman as a package manager.

> Any 32-bit edition of Windows

I was quite disappointed when I bought a cheap Windows Table/Laptop to tinker with. And the Windows installer would not let install the 64bit version on 2 gigs of ram...

> Personally I prefer to wrap Cygwin in http://www.msys2.org/

Can you tell me more about that? Isn't cygwin and msys2 two separate project?

"At its core is an independent rewrite of MSYS, based on modern Cygwin (POSIX compatibility layer)".

So I guess "wrap cygwin" isn't quite accurate, but it's based on the cygwin and extended.

Cygwin's not just bash (in fact, you don't even have to use bash in Cygwin -- you can use zsh, for instance). There are thousands of packages in Cygwin's package manager, and you can also compile your own using gcc or another compiler you can get through Cygwin.

"Bash on Windows" is pretty misleading - it's really a Linux kernel translator. You can use (supported) three distros, and as long as your Linux software doesn't use any non-translated APIs, it will Just Work.

This is why the default Ubuntu will let you apt-get more-or-less anything from the Ubuntu binary repos.

WSL / Bash on windows comes with apt-get and the entire Ubuntu repository.

As a former Cygwin user, I consider WSL vastly superior for my uses and have switched for good earlier this month.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com