It's much, much faster than Cygwin. Yes, it comes with most of the common shells out of the box: bash, ksh, etc. Even sets up start menu shortcuts for each,

It's much, much faster than Cygwin. Yes, it comes with most of the common shells out of the box: bash, ksh, etc. Even sets up start menu shortcuts for each, to encourage you to dip your toe in the water. Most of the user-space tools are based on OpenBSD userland rather than GNU utilities. Like Cygwin, it uses PE-COFF for binaries. It comes with both real GCC and a GCC-like wrapper for MSVC so that you can attempt to build software without modifying existing build files. Unfortunately, software compatibility isn't great. It's not that SUA/SFU is a bad implementation of UNIX, it's just that we live in a world where "everything is Linux." Building things on SUA/SFU really sucks, just like it sucks to build software on any other niche UNIX. (AIX, HP-UX, etc)