Re: Dimdows Decay Syndrome Continues

On 8 Feb 2025 20:41:26 GMT, Frank Slootweg wrote:

  Indeed it isn't, but - as I later mentioned - I use tin as my
newsreader and I mentioned 'GNU', meaning all the GNU tools/commands/
etc.. Granted, most of the latter can also be gotten as 'native' Windows
executables, but probably not with a 'package manager' such as Cygwin
has.

That's one of my first steps when provisioning a new Windows machine --
adding the native Windows tools. I can only take so much of 'ls' failing
and I never bothered to learn to use 'dir' effectively.
 

  If I was starting now/recently, I would probably use WSL (Windows
Subsystem for Linux), but I already used similar stuff in the 80s, so
Cygwin was the logical choice for Windows.

I have installed Cygwin in the past but at work we used the MKS Nutcracker
tools and runtime. They didn't play together all that well. Using Cygwin
for a commercial suite of apps was out.

I started using DJGPP on DOS. My 'hello world' was porting
MidnightCommander back to Windows, which is ironic considering it started
as a port of a Windows app. I did a little work on what is now MinGW. That
was started by Anders Norlander and carried on by Mumit Khan. I don't know
who is developing it these days. The philosophy was different, using GNU
tools to build native Windows apps. Corinna Vinschen at that time took the
Cygwin route trying to bring POSIX to Windows.

WSL is handy. We had a map product that required a base map. Usually no
problem but at trade shows a decent internet connection is expensive and
often sucks. It's fairly easy to create a map tile server using OSM data
on Linux but a real mess on Windows. Solution: run the tile server on a
WSL Debian instance on the marketing laptops, with the Windows
applications on the same machine. I originally thought about running the
tile server on a mini but that approach led to one less piece of equipment
to get lost.

Most of my Windows machines are set up for WSL but between here and work
I've got five dedicated Linux boxes, if you count the Debian derived
Raspberry Pi OS so I use those. Almost everything I use is cross platform
anyway so the Linux and Windows boxes are provisioned very similarly.