[1996]

It's even cheaper to only use what you need with msys2!

bash inside mintty gives me all I need, with minimal overhead.

Eventually, I'd like to see bash inside Windows Terminal made easily available - complete that with busybox, and you cover 90% of the Linux usecases without having to download anything (a bit like how starting Terminal.app offers most of what you need on MacOS)

Add an option to install packages using msys2/pacman for the power users, and I believe most people would not waste time (or disk space, or ram) playing with WSL1 or WSL2 just to run the one thing they may need.

[shawnz]

What makes you think the overhead between Cygwin/msys2 and WSL 1 would really be so great? They are both just translation layers after all.

[1996]

WSL1 tries to do too much. WSL2 tries to do even more.

msys2 mostly cares about running your textmode software.

For example, someone talked about processes. Here's all that I see in msys2:

# ps xwau

      PID    PPID    PGID     WINPID   TTY         UID    STIME COMMAND

      480     479     480      18796  pty1      197611 14:13:13 /usr/bin/bash

      479       1     479      16872  ?         197611 14:13:12 /usr/bin/mintty

     1118     480    1118      16496  pty1      197611 17:00:32 /usr/bin/ps

Most of the time, I don't need to access Windows processes - and if I do, data can be exchanged through a file.

[shawnz]

WSL1 also doesn't show windows proceses in 'ps', only the WSL processes. For example:

    shawnz@ShawnsPC:/mnt/c/Users/shawn$ ps xwau
    USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
    root         1  0.0  0.0   8936   184 ?        Ssl  Nov17   0:00 /init
    root         6  0.0  0.0   8936    96 tty1     Ss   Nov17   0:00 /init
    shawnz       7  0.0  0.0  18588  2708 tty1     S    Nov17   0:00 -bash
    shawnz     252  0.0  0.0  18880  1984 tty1     R    18:04   0:00 ps xwau

[1996]

But in your example, I can already see you have a init system and multiple users - neither of which will be needed in most cases.

[shawnz]

The "init" process is just a stub used by WSL, it is not a "real" init system. And Cygwin also allows the creation of multiple users within the Cygwin environment, doesn't it? It's just a matter of populating /etc/passwd. If you want to use WSL1 with a single user then you could just set the default user to root.

[utxaa]

main draw for wsl2 for my team was IO performance. how is git on huge projects under msys2?