I disagree that a Unix shell has few advantages. :) It's critical if you're trying to work in a cross platform environment. If a colleague gives me a .sh script

I disagree that a Unix shell has few advantages. :) It's critical if you're trying to work in a cross platform environment. If a colleague gives me a .sh script, I need some way to run that. There's also a huge benefit to having access to the ecosystem of Unix command-line apps. A few of the major ones have been ported over to run natively on Windows, but there's a lot that will never be. As I mentioned in another comment: Every modern OS except Windows has a Bash-like shell and environment. I can move easily between MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Android, and iOS, and it feels similar. But every time I use a Windows machine, nothing I've done elsewhere translates. Cygwin helps bridge that gap.