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Comment by sergius | Hacker News Reader

If you install git for windows, https://gitforwindows.org/, you get a ready to go Cygwin installation of most tools you need, including bash.

But probably WSL is you best bet for a saner environment.

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If the way to make Windows better is to install things that make it more like Linux, then I have to ask, why not just use Linux instead?

I guess that would be a no-brainer if someone considered anything that made Windows more like Linux an improvement, but they probably don't. People in general feel most comfortable with the Desktop shell they are used to (the little differences feel jarring) and people who are used to using Windows probably also use some Windows-exclusive software.

Also, it's not like Windows has no upsides to it. Relatively recently, I bought a laptop that came with Windows 10 (as they often do), and I noticed that it boots up pretty quickly to login screen; I think a fair bit faster than it takes for another OS to boot up to just the full-disk encryption prompt. It's certainly not enough to make me consider using Windows, but it's not nothing, either.

For the person who wrote the original article, then the answer would be "because that's not an option at their employer."

For me, personally, the answer is that I feel Windows provides a better desktop experience, but Linux provides a better command-line experience.

For more opinions on that topic, see https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/s0m8...

Because the way to make Linux better is to install things that make it more like Windows. Unfortunately for Linux, the one thing you can't install is software compatibility with Windows apps (unless you count Wine, which even after all these years you really can't). So if you want to run Windows apps the way to go is Windows augmented with Linux features rather than Linux augmented with Windows features.

That gets you a better shell, which is great.

Unfortunately it still leaves you with a terrible terminal emulator. IDK if you can use MSYS2 with "Windows Terminal", though. I haven't bothered to try.

This is actually mingw-based, not cygwin. Regardless it still works very well.

Funny enough, it’s a bit of both. The msys2 runtime is a fork of the Cygwin runtime, and they keep parity pretty well.

https://github.com/msys2/msys2-runtime

To be even more pedantic, the Unix tools that come with Git for Windows are MSYS2-based, not MinGW-based, and MSYS2 is more like Cygwin than it's like MinGW (it's Cygwin with a few patches.)

MSYS2, rather, which often seems to be bundled with a hybrid mingw install, but itself is based on a patchset to the main cygwin DLL and generally is a 'saner cygwin'.

git bash is definitely one of the first things I install on any Microsoft Windows build -- gives me a half-way decent terminal, vim, and of course a complete and modern git.

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