| Thanks, sure, POSIX is a round hole and Windows a square peg, but I think that the excellent work done by Cygwin over the last few years has done a great deal to file down the edges of the Windows peg. MSYS2's hacks on top usually function ok. With Git, I can clone very large projects almost as quickly with MSYS2 as I can ArchLinux. We did begin to port msysGit (the native, non-MSYS executable, yeah, go figure) to MSYS2 and found very little speed improvement so stopped since the msys2 version is much more functional and always up-to-date. Using Autotools on MSYS2 isn't significantly slower than on GNU/Linux. You can try building any of the many Autotools based projects we provide to see this for yourself. Besides, for software which relies on Autotools for it's build system, there's no choice but to use it (outside of cross compilation). That NTFS (and the Windows filesystem layer) isn't fast is independent of MSYS2 vs native Windows anyway. An anti-virus will slow down all Windows tasks to an unusable crawl, just run your scan overnight and take care about what you click on. MSYS2 isn't hit worse than, say Visual Studio. Fundamentally MSYS2 is software distribution who's end product is native Windows applications aimed at the user. The POSIX stuff exists just helps us get there (this is why we don't provide X Windows; if you want that, use Cygwin), so for example using Qt Creator as supplied by MSYS2 should give an experience that's roughly the same as using Qt Creator supplied by the Qt Project (but much easier to maintain). Apart from for installing and updating packages, you can avoid the MSYS2 console and just run programs in C:\msys64\mingw64\bin. The security advantages we bring via shared packages (e.g. libraries) are very worthwhile. > Trying to deal with SSH through bash and msys is not a user friendly experience. PuTTY is the gold standard of SSH clients on Windows. Since on MSYS2, things are shared, your SSH keys are shared between all applications that use them in ~/.ssh, as you'd expect. I use mklink /D to unify my Windows User folder and my MSYS2 HOME folders (be careful not to use our un-installer if you do this though, if follows the symlink :-(). We do have putty but I haven't checked that it doesn't use %AppData% or worse, the Windows registry to store keys. If it does that's a bug we'll fix. To install putty: $ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-putty |