I've used cygwin last around 2011. And yes, for the most part it accomplished it goals, but so did brew on osx. It was just every now and then I'd hit some ma

I've used cygwin last around 2011. And yes, for the most part it accomplished it goals, but so did brew on osx. It was just every now and then I'd hit some make script or gem compile that didn't work and drove me batty. I hope my post didnt come across that you cant do _anything_ with cygwin or brew. I just ran into enough issues that like OP all I wanted was to sit down and work and that pointed me to bare metal linux. Later after being frustrated by the desktop environments I found pleasure in having Windows manage my windows (as well as all the windows only apps) and let linux run in a VM that all I needed from it was a shell. So as long as my VM is running in the background I can click a shell icon in my quick launch bar that lives right next to command prompt, putty connection manager, and github's git shell (which I use for projects that are win based and dont need a vm, like some .net). The shell is just like cygwin only you are limited to what you share on samba (or vmware folder share if you use that)