What's happening with the Cygwin project?

I recall recently seeing a remark (on a node I cannot find now) wherein the monk asked "is Cygwin still supported?" That's a good question. Certainly cygwinPerl seem to be alive and current on the Cygwin download servers (at the time of this writing, v5.40.0). But a mechanism for asking questions about Cygwin in general is seemingly problematic and has been for a while. The Cygwin website is completely out of date, directing users to mailing lists that do not exist anymore. Apparently to reach Cygwin developers one must use NNTP (we're talking old school here).

The Cygwin.com site says: "Please note that the gmane website and its newsgroup search interface is down since August 2016. Only the aforementioned NNTP gateway is still up."

I see a fair amount of traffic in Cygwin questions on StackOverflow and its related sites, and if someone were to ask me where to get general help with Cygwin today, that's where I would direct them.

Oct 22, 2024 at 18:07 UTC
Examine what is said, not who speaks.
Love the truth but pardon error.
Silence betokens consent.
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
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Re: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by choroba (Cardinal) on Oct 22, 2024 at 18:37 UTC
    > directing users to mailing lists that do not exist anymore

    The very first mailing list link seems to work and the list seems active: the archive shows the last message from today.

    map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]
[reply]
[d/l]

      Sorry to spread misinformation. It was completely inadvertent. What happened on my end was a failure notice from Gmail, stating that the cygwin-users was unreachable:

      > Address not found
      > Your message wasn't delivered to cygwin@sourceware.cygnus.com because the domain
      > sourceware.cygnus.com couldn't be found. Check for typos or unnecessary spaces and try again.

      Later I got a reply from the server (Gmail tries for 48 hrs) but of course, Gmail being the helpful entity that is, that mailman reply was put in my spam folder, where I forget to check for it.

      I haven't got any mail from cygwin-users yet, and I am looking forward to "proof of life."

      Oct 22, 2024 at 22:27 UTC
      Examine what is said, not who speaks.
      Love the truth but pardon error.
      Silence betokens consent.
      In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
[reply]
Re: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by jo37 (Curate) on Oct 23, 2024 at 18:03 UTC

    I had been a passionate Cygwin user for more than 20 years at $JOB, when I finally realized that WSL is a truly better alternative. It's worth a try.

    Greetings,
    🐻

    $gryYup$d0ylprbpriprrYpkJl2xyl~rzg??P~5lp2hyl0p$
[reply]

      Me too, exactly. I just don't have time, especially at $work, to be ideological. Not to mention that $employer has a paid, enterprise support contract with Micro$oft. lol

[reply]

      I moved to MobaXterm from Cygwin more than a decade ago. It's just Cygwin wrapped up in a nice package, but I find it so much easier to manage than Cygwin by itself, as long as you stick to the basics.

      Of course, I'm still using VirtualBox or WSL for the heavy lifting with MobaX as the front end, and haven't seriously tried to do everything in Cygwin or MobaXterm for years.

[reply]
      Can you say more about why WSL is better?
[reply]

        With WSL, the packages in use are native Linux, whereas in Cygwin there is only a subset available. Installing a package from source may work, but is cumbersome. When you select a new Cygwin package for installation, the package manager will update everything. Maybe you get a new perl version and you have to reinstall all of your local perl modules.

        I do not see any disadvantages in using WSL. The integration is flawless: you can run Win programs from bash and Linux programs from Win. X11 and Wayland are natively supported: no need for a separate X11/Wayland server.

        Greetings,
        🐻

        $gryYup$d0ylprbpriprrYpkJl2xyl~rzg??P~5lp2hyl0p$
[reply]
        Cygwin at its core is mainly the UNIX API implemented on top of Win32. WSL started in a very similar way, implementing Linux APIs as a new Windows subsystem, but then, for WSL2 they switched to a virtual machine approach. So, now, what you have there is a real Linux running on a virtual machine (you can even choose what distribution you want), with an extra layer for interoperability and integration with the host Windows OS. Because of this, current versions of WSL in general, work much better than Cygwin.

        To be honest, that makes me a bit sad, because the Cygwin endeavor was titanic and now it is loosing all its relevance. It involved not just fully re-implementing the UNIX API from scratch but also doing it on top of an OS providing, in several cases, incompatible abstractions (for instance, fork)... if the developers only had had access to the new functionality MS added for WSL1!

[reply]
Re: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by swl (Prior) on Oct 25, 2024 at 22:01 UTC

    Perhaps a little off topic, but perhaps not given WSL is being discussed elsewhere in this thread.

    I'm somewhat surprised that nobody has mentioned MSYS2. I switched to it from Cygwin some years ago. It has a good selection of packages and integrates with windows programs more easily than WSL instances. i.e. one can run the usual unix utilities and then call windows utilities if and when needed.

    (Although FWIW, I use WSL far more than MSYS2 as then I can test code on native unix/linux).

[reply]
Re: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by Intrepid (Curate) on Oct 25, 2024 at 20:31 UTC

    I've got a lot of learning-curve time invested in cygwin, but I had been intrigued by the claimed capabilities of WSL and I am not sorry that the topic in later nodes switched tracks a bit. I have one question about WSL at the moment: how does the installing of binary Linux packages work? Is there something like a "WSL package manager" or has WSL adopted something from Redhat, Debian or similar?

    Withe respect, thanks good monks!

    Oct 25, 2024 at 20:15 UTC

    The open palm of desire
    Wants everything, it wants everything
    It wants soil as soft as summer
    And the strength to push like spring
    Paul Simon -> Further to Fly

[reply]

      All of that is up to you. You first decide which flavor of Linux to install (I keep a clean arch dist and a messy Debian for dev) and to install software, you just use the appropriate package manager for that OS.

      Here's the current list of distributions directly managed and provided by Microsoft (wsl --list --online): 

      The following is a list of valid distributions that can be installed.
Install using 'wsl.exe --install <Distro>'.

NAME                            FRIENDLY NAME
Ubuntu                          Ubuntu
Debian                          Debian GNU/Linux
kali-linux                      Kali Linux Rolling
Ubuntu-18.04                    Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ubuntu-20.04                    Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Ubuntu-22.04                    Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Ubuntu-24.04                    Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
OracleLinux_7_9                 Oracle Linux 7.9
OracleLinux_8_7                 Oracle Linux 8.7
OracleLinux_9_1                 Oracle Linux 9.1
openSUSE-Leap-15.6              openSUSE Leap 15.6
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-15-SP5    SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP5
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-15-SP6    SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP6
openSUSE-Tumbleweed             openSUSE Tumbleweed

      See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install for the basics. You can install multiple distros and there's a ton of user created distributions on github and elsewhere with preinstalled software if you're unfamiliar with Linux and don't know where to begin.

[reply]
[d/l]
      how does the installing of binary Linux packages work?

      You choose one (or more) distibutions from a list including Debian, Ubuntu and others and are given a virtual environment with the selected flavour(s). Afterwards you use the native package management of your distribution. It's a VM, but you don't need to care about it. Starting a terminal emulation from the Windows menu will fire up the VM. Yes: Linux applications appear inside the Windows menu.

      Greetings,
      🐻

      $gryYup$d0ylprbpriprrYpkJl2xyl~rzg??P~5lp2hyl0p$
[reply]

      I am using an "Ubuntu" flavor of WSL on a Win11 Laptop because it seems to be the default (other distributions exist). I install binary packages as usual on Debian/Ubuntu systems with apt-get or synaptic. So far without any issues.

      I also have been using Cygwin quite a lot in the past, but it seems that I won't need it any more.

[reply]

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