Cygwin is extremely lightweight, it's basically just a library implementing the POSIX syscalls, and native win32 apps linked to it. Since it's so lightweight,

Cygwin is extremely lightweight, it's basically just a library implementing the POSIX syscalls, and native win32 apps linked to it. Since it's so lightweight, you can have, use, and throw away as many cygwin envs (folders) as you like. It doesn't require any Windows subsystem, hypervisor, admin rights, Linux distribution or anything, and will even work on an XP machine should you need it. Finally: much less bloat to run and store.