Cygwin
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
4recommend
1warn against
Nov 2, 2025first mention
Oct 31, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“I used Cygwin a lot for giving Windows a more refined developer experience.”
“Cygwin was technically the correct approach”
Show 1 more
“the bigger thing that enabled them is indeed Cygwin project since it unlocked the path”
Caveats and dissent
Often compared with
Threads where it came up
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Data: cygwin.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 15
“I produced a fork of the Cygwin DLL”
“cygwin is just used for build”
“I used Cygwin a lot for giving Windows a more refined developer experience.”
“They fork Cygwin, put some patches on”
“Cygwin executables need cygwin1.dll to run”
I used to use LOADLIN.exe - worked pretty, IIRC
“It was slow.”
“Cygwin was technically the correct approach”
I am using Windows now for about 20 years after being a FreeBSD user. I switched to Linux actually to be able to interact with my work environment which was using Windows tools (both office but also embedded development tools at the time) and I think virtualization/emulation was a lot easier. After bricking my laptop multiple times while traveling, because I always feeled inclined to fiddle with everything in my OS e
“the only two with “many” packages are Cygwin and MSYS2”
“the bigger thing that enabled them is indeed Cygwin project since it unlocked the path”
“I used Cygwin and later MSYS on Windows in the process of moving back to UNIX”
“Or you could install and old copy of Cygwin or MinGW.”
“In the Cygnal fork of the cygwin.dll, I hacked Cygwin's POSIX chdir() function”
“I was more a Cygwin user”