[emcrazyone]

I can't think of much that would benefit from this except for, perhaps, headless command line type applications. The one that comes to mind is rsync. Being able to compile the latest version/protocol of rsync on a Linux machine and then running the same binary on a Windows host would be nice but fun seems to end there plus with Cygwin, this is largely a no-brainer without M$ help.

What about applications that hook to X Windows or do things like opening the frame buffer device. I've got a messaging application that can be compiled for both Windows and Linux and depending on the OS, I compile a different transport layer. Under Linux heavy use of epoll is used which is very different than how NT handles Async I/O - especially with sockets. So my application's "transport driver" is either compiling an NT code base using WinSock & OVERLAPPED IO or a Linux code base using EPOLL and pthreads.

Over all it seems like a nice to have but I'm struggling to extract any real benefit.

Can anyone offer up some real good use cases I may be overlooking?

[quux]

There are both free and commercial X servers for Windows, and you can get a linux app running under WSL to work with one of those X servers very easily. I played with it a little bit and it worked fine.