[csixty4]

The page is kinda light on details.

From my experience doing web development, msys2 + PuTTY/Pagent give me pretty much everything I need. I don't even use bash; everything I need is available from cmd.exe, including tools like ls & grep.

Microsoft isn't going to say so, but you can get an Office365 gift card for like $20 on eBay. That gives you the Office apps plus a good chunk of storage on OneDrive and some Skype credit for a year.

It wasn't as painful of a transition as I expected. I guess it helps that so much of my life is in the cloud these days anyway.

[dublinben]

>I guess it helps that so much of my life is in the cloud these days anyway

This seems like an excellent reason to not be using Windows as your underlying OS. The rampant privacy and security issues should be enough to keep any business from trusting it. The lack of a compelling reason to choose it should be the end of the story.

[brazzledazzle]

Microsoft's business versions of Windows have substantially different configuration settings and license agreements.

[brazzledazzle]

I find PuTTY so aggravating to use. I've only used Cygwin but I assume msys2 has an ssh client. Do you use PuTTY over that since it's the workflow you're used to or do you find it to be a better experience?

[csixty4]

Pagent has become a sort of de-facto standard for ssh agents on Windows. Once I get my Yubikey set up, I can even substitute gpg for Pagent and have it speak the same protocol (it's a setting, off by default).

Git for Windows drops in a command line ssh client pre-configured for Pagent auth, and git itself can pull keys from Pagent as well. I just needed to tweak my path so that ssh client gets used instead of msys2's.

I'm with you. I can't stand the actual PuTTY app itself.