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Comment by m2f2 | Hacker News Reader

How long will cygwin lifetime be?

A proud cygwin user myself, with cygwin in the PATH since the 2000s, I recently sideloaded Ubuntu under wsl.

Right now, wsl is my primary terminal app, I've mounted C:\ as /c, added a symlink to bypass the ugly Onedrive default name, and... I'm happy.

Slowly, I removed 90% of the mixed BAT scripts, converted to bash the rest, and I now enjoy it.

As the old timer that I am, I limp around powershell, so no luck with that.

Cygwin on the other hand seems to be slowly dying, as more and more packages are now unsupported/unmaintained, with Redhat apparently willing to smother it at the first viable moment.

Any thought?

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There's a long history of Unix-like environments on Windows dating to the 1980s: MKS Toolkit (Mortice Kern Systems, later incorporated into Windows Services for Unix, precursor of WSL), UWIN from David Korn, Cygwin, and others.

I'd experimented with several of these before I realised that what I wanted wasn't Windows running Unix-like utilities, but a real honest-to-goddess Unix system, which was spelled "Linux".

I'm using the nixos wsl image and a majority of my linux workstation setup was just installed with almost zero effort. happy and impressed. Using the Ameliorated.io debloater plus nixos wsl makes Windows almost tolerable.

git-for-windows (the default Windows git client) includes a bash.exe and a selection of gnu utils.

it's based on MSYS2, so it's native. maybe you should check this one out.

GfW is remarkably hostile to installing any additional components (e.g. I’ve needed to get ahold of rsync), especially compared to normal MSYS2, which is as flexible as any Linux distro.

it seems possible to install GfW into an existing MSYS2:

https://gitforwindows.org/install-inside-msys2-proper

Right, and manually extracting MSYS2 packages into an MSYS2 environment is also possible if very unsupported (used that to get a copy of rsync once). My point, rather, is that GfW isn’t and shouldn’t be your starting point if you want to get a Unix-like environment; use actual MSYS2 instead.

I was a limper too, until I saw this demonstration by the creator of PowerShell from 2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mBRA7pqITM

as a former long time cygwin user, my advice is dump cygwin ASAP. its not really good for anything anymore. the only reason I ever used it was for a C compiler, but Zig does that way better than Cygwin ever did. also honestly I don't even use C anymore unless I need to, I write most stuff in Go, but both Go and Zig can cross compile. finally I am using windows terminal and PowerShell

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