Re: This Is Why They Say Windows Is A Great OS -- If Your Time Is Worth Nothing

On 1 Jan 2025 21:14:06 GMT, Frank Slootweg wrote:

  As to Cygwin, for my personal use, Windows programs and all GNU tools
is the best combination, ever since early 2003. WSL came way too late
for me considering to switch to it.

I don't think it has been maintained in a while but there was a native
Windows build of Unix utilities that didn't depend on Cygwin or MSYS2. I
get tired of typing ls and finding nothing there.

I haven't used Cygwin recently. Speaking of way too late I started with
DJGPP which ported gcc to Windows. There were two threads growing out of
that. Corrina Vinschen and others took the Cygwin branch which more to
create a Unix environment of Windows while Colin Peters, and later Mumit
Khan took the mingw32 branch to use gcc to build native Windows programs
that became MSYS2 over the years. It was an interesting era.

At work we used the MKS NutCracker tools to port what were originally AIX
programs to Windows. While Cygwin would have probably worked it would have
gotten into the whole GPL limitations on commercial software morass.