4 ms·

You can run Unix processes on Windows 7 and the others with MSYS or Cygwin or on Windows 10 using the Microsoft-provided Linux compatibility layer.

owlmirror 10y ago
Which presents itself as a much higher barrier. Only the smallest fraction of Windows PCs have these layers enabled/correctly configured, for it to run. Virtually all Windows PCs have a Browser installed and running. Most users know how to open and operate a Browser. Of course it's kind of redundant for everything to be reimplemented into the browser, things that should be implemented and used on a OS level, but I think it's a testament of the shortcomings of the UX design or even more fundamental paradigms of personal computing.
- eriknstr 10y ago
  >Only the smallest fraction of Windows PCs have these layers enabled/correctly configured, for it to run. I have never had any trouble running either MSYS2 or Cygwin on Windows computers even when the amount of privileges given to my account has been very low.
  - 0942v8653 10y ago
    The website to MSYS2 was blocked by my high school's firewall. I think Cygwin used Sourceforge, which was arbitrarily filtered for badware risk. There were other ways of fixing that, but my point is… it'a good to have alternatives, and the browser ensures good portability.
minxomat 10y ago
Mixing cygwin and WSL in one sentence is generally a bad idea. cygwin even says right on their website that it is not a way to run linux or unix programs on Windows. cygwin and WSL serve the complete opposite purpose. WSL (and flinux) enable unmodified linux binaries to be run on Windows. WSL handles this at the kernel level, while flinux uses a higher level BCT. cygwin has another purpose: It requires everything to be built from source, linking against one or more native Windows libraries (most notably cygwin1) that emulate POSIX. In short: cygwin's goal isn't to run unix programs whatsoever, it just provides Windows applications with an interface to use emulated POSIX calls - which is awesome, too. Since WSL supports binaries at the kernel, performance is much greater for features where cygwin would have to emulate a completely different paradigm (like fork). So while cygwin is pretty useful for a quick and usually dirty porting of unix programs to Windows, and is even frequently used to emulate(!) a unix environment, WSL can run any linux environment of your choice (the standard being ubuntu) natively.

owlmirror 10y ago

Which presents itself as a much higher barrier. Only the smallest fraction of Windows PCs have these layers enabled/correctly configured, for it to run. Virtually all Windows PCs have a Browser installed and running. Most users know how to open and operate a Browser. Of course it's kind of redundant for everything to be reimplemented into the browser, things that should be implemented and used on a OS level, but I think it's a testament of the shortcomings of the UX design or even more fundamental paradigms of personal computing.

eriknstr 10y ago
>Only the smallest fraction of Windows PCs have these layers enabled/correctly configured, for it to run. I have never had any trouble running either MSYS2 or Cygwin on Windows computers even when the amount of privileges given to my account has been very low.
- 0942v8653 10y ago
  The website to MSYS2 was blocked by my high school's firewall. I think Cygwin used Sourceforge, which was arbitrarily filtered for badware risk. There were other ways of fixing that, but my point is… it'a good to have alternatives, and the browser ensures good portability.

minxomat 10y ago

Mixing cygwin and WSL in one sentence is generally a bad idea. cygwin even says right on their website that it is not a way to run linux or unix programs on Windows. cygwin and WSL serve the complete opposite purpose. WSL (and flinux) enable unmodified linux binaries to be run on Windows. WSL handles this at the kernel level, while flinux uses a higher level BCT. cygwin has another purpose: It requires everything to be built from source, linking against one or more native Windows libraries (most notably cygwin1) that emulate POSIX. In short: cygwin's goal isn't to run unix programs whatsoever, it just provides Windows applications with an interface to use emulated POSIX calls - which is awesome, too. Since WSL supports binaries at the kernel, performance is much greater for features where cygwin would have to emulate a completely different paradigm (like fork). So while cygwin is pretty useful for a quick and usually dirty porting of unix programs to Windows, and is even frequently used to emulate(!) a unix environment, WSL can run any linux environment of your choice (the standard being ubuntu) natively.