in reply to What's happening with the Cygwin project?

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$
  • Comment on Re: What's happening with the Cygwin project?

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Re^2: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by jdporter (Paladin) on Oct 23, 2024 at 21:59 UTC

    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]
Re^2: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by jeffenstein (Hermit) on Oct 24, 2024 at 06:38 UTC

    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]
Re^2: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by Arunbear (Prior) on Oct 24, 2024 at 09:34 UTC
    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]
        > When you select a new Cygwin package for installation, the package manager will update everything.

        I think you can select what should be installed and what should be updated. At least it was possible 10 years ago when I used Cygwin at work.

        map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]
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[d/l]
          I do not see any disadvantages in using WSL.

        I've used WSL for some specific purposes, but from what I remember I had to allocate memory to it that could not be used by Windows. Perhaps I am misremembering, but if that is the case it's a big issue/disadvantage for me. With cygwin, both cygwin and windows have all the RAM available to them.

[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!

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