Personally, I find Cygwin to be a horrible substitute for a real Unix, in large part because so many emulated Unix operations like fork() are horribly slow. So

Personally, I find Cygwin to be a horrible substitute for a real Unix, in large part because so many emulated Unix operations like fork() are horribly slow. Sometime try running a "configure" script, and see how much slower it runs than on Linux or Mac OS X on similar hardware.