Hi,
I just wanted to clarify things which showed up upon the first posts in this topic, regarding the difference between Cygwin and WSL.
If it comes to Cygwin, you are depending on some comparably unstable environment. Cygwin integrates quite heavily into your system (registry, a veeery large installation if you don't know how to prevent it from installing all the stuff you don't actually need), the launch time can be quite bad if there are many tools installed. Its advantage is that things like X do work quite well, but thats almost it. Cygwin only knows the Windows filesystem and is limited to that.
WSL isn't some Linux emulation, cannot be compared to VMs or whatever. WSL is an absolutely real Linux distribution, with a layer underneath which maps linux-related hardware stuff to their equivalent Windows counterparts. It doesn't yet know all the required Linux stuff, but it improves from Windows 10 upgrade to upgrade. That means that you can just use apt-get to do all the stuff like the real Linux distros can do, a thing cygwin doesn't yet know. There are helping hands like cyg-apt or apt-cyg which try to simulate an apt-get command for cygwin, but the don't really work at all. Also, repairing a broken WSL isn't any kind of problem, compared to repairing a broken cygwin environment. Its simply deleting the old linux distro, re-downloading it and installing it. Done.
The WSL also has some positive impacts on Windows 10 itself. The default notepad application from Windows 10 will know Windows and Unix line endings from Windows 10 1810 onwards, WSL can run Linux commands as well as Windows commands, which allows you to write sh scripts which combine the full force of Linux and Windows command line tools alike, without the need to compile some special stuff for Cygwin first instead of simply running apt-get for it or maybe even download a pre-compiled linux binary from the net.
Since Windows 1803 Linux daemons even continue running when closing the bash window, enabling you to run e.g. an ssh server on Windows machine, even though you can just use the WSL when connecting to it, but whatever. It almost replaced my Debian VM already, and it reduces the VM overhead regarding speed and performance drastically due to additional apps like VMWare Player, QEmu or Virtualbox no longer required to launch it.
Its not yet worth using in production environments and it still needs many improvements to fully integrate into the Windows environment, but its deffinetily a step into the right direction by Microsoft, they finally noticed that Linux actually is a thing for developers and native support for it is just amazing. I also like the idea more to have a distro running which gets developed by a community which can rely on a much larger user base than Cygwin has to offer.
People who are happy with Cygwin can stick with it for sure and as long as you don't have Windows 10 running you probably have no other choice than taking a VM as an alternative. But as soon as you got Windows 10 flying around, give WSL with e.g. Ubuntu a chance. Its faster, more elegant, an actually real linux and its not as easy to break as Cygwin is .
Best Regards.
Hijacker