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Comment by bigpeopleareold | Hacker News Reader

I am in the same situation with having to (or was required to use) Windows 10 on hardware. I just wanted a bash shell with network access via the VPN. On that computer I was able to install MSYS2 with some certificate tweaks to get it to work on the VPN (git bash is fine too). I realized gradually I can do most things on my Linux laptop and a virtual desktop :)

Regardless, I think this is great, particularly for colleagues, so I can have a good story around using something Linux on their Windows laptops (specifically bash, docker, using devops tooling, etc.)

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IMHO, if the requirement is just for Linux CLI tools, WSL1 - it still exists - may have been a better experience. It gives access to a complete distro without having to deal with WSL2 hibernation issues.

IMHO, they should have invested more in WSL1 - it actually shares Windows resources and runs under the Windows kernel rather than trying to do clever things with virtual machines.

Yeah WSL1 is underrated - and more elegant IMHO

I think the reason they gave up is because the Linux kernel has a LOT of syscalls, and every single one would have to be implemented flawlessly in order to properly support all of userspace. They'd basically be implementing a second Linux kernel.

Also because filesystem access translation results in very poor performance vs native Linux filesystem, which is basically insurmountable because of Windows design.

Elegant but really hard to implement and maintain (at least on top of the NT base (which I mention because illumos and some BSDs implement Linux compat more easily by being unix-like in the first place)); it's much like how WINE is pretty decent but will always have more compatibility problems than just running Windows in a VM.

Probably, but this is on a corporate computer and I saw that no WSL version would work. I am otherwise not interested in using Windows (and found a way to avoid it :D )

Cygwin64? Im using it all the time on Windows 10. Without it I would be huge pain to use Windows at all. Pretty much everything works fine over cygwin64, I didnt yet find a tool that has problems. And I like that its just cygwin.dll providing basic POSIX layer, everything else its just windows (networking, FS, ...)

Yeah ... the MSYS2 site says: "The unixy tools in MSYS2 are directly based on Cygwin, so there is some overlap there. While Cygwin focuses on building Unix software on Windows as is, MSYS2 focuses on building native software built against the Windows APIs."

I've been using git for windows / msys2 bash for a while on top of WSL2 - you don't find it to be annoyingly slow?

Hmm, I think I am not following. Why using msys2 bash on top of WSL2? You either using WSL or cygwin/msys2.

GIT is slower on cygwin, especially stat() with do hacks to check for +x mode. But once cache is warm, it works fine. Albeit, I didnt used GIT under Win10 from quite some time, im doing most of my stuff on older windows using my very old Cygwin fork thats is more snappier :)

I use msys2 bash sometimes to collaborate with people and projects who are using it. Adoption of WSL2 is still a work-in-progress at secure enterprises.

Ahh ok, this makes sense. Well, I barely use my corpo Win10. I hate it. Cygwin64 helps a lot, but still if I can do work on my desktops Ill do it there. Basic stuff can be done on Win10 in shell (bash).

So, cannot say much about Win10 + msys2 + new GIT performance here. My laptop is slow anyway with all the bloat IT put there :)

One thing I found useful is setting up a VPN docker container and reverse proxying only the things that I need through the VPN.

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