[m2f2]

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?

[dredmorbius]

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".

[colordrops]

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.

[dist-epoch]

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.

[mananaysiempre]

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.

[ormax3]

it seems possible to install GfW into an existing MSYS2:

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

[mananaysiempre]

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.

[thingfish]

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

[38]

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