Comment by muxator

8 years ago

If one's necessities are not limited to an ssh client, Cygwin has been available for years, is free software, and has a very good integration with Windows (you have read/write access to the whole filesystem, for example, something presently cannot be done with win10 subsystem for Linux)

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muxator

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tiernano  8 years ago

the WSL does have full access to the file system... cd /mnt/c/ gets you access to the C drive...

dataflow  8 years ago

I highly recommend MSYS2 over Cygwin (assuming WSL isn't an option). It's much faster and the package manager (pacman) is friendly.

  • barrkel  8 years ago

    According to the MSYS2 devs, MSYS2 is slightly slower than Cygwin, and it has a significantly different project objective, leading to much reduced command-line environment:

    https://stackoverflow.com/a/25755481/3712 (MSYS2 dev)

    As for whether it's slower, I expect there'd be very little difference but MSYS2 would be a tiny amount slower due to the extra conversion work.

    https://github.com/msys2/msys2/wiki/How-does-MSYS2-differ-fr...

    MSYS2 provies a minimal shell required to run autotools and other build systems which get the source for software from the Internet from different repositories, configure them and build them. The shell and core tools exist mainly to allow porting Unix programs to run natively on Windows (i.e. without requiring a POSIX emulation layer). MSYS2 doesn't try to duplicate Cygwin's efforts more than necessary, so the number of provided POSIX-emulated software is very small.

    (I recommend Cygwin, I've been using it for 15 years or so, and have access to almost everything I've ever needed from Linux command line. The slowest thing is forking; emulating it in Win32 executables is not easy on NT kernel. MSYS2 doesn't fix that.

    Also, apt-cyg is pretty decent for installing packages on Cygwin.)

    • dataflow  8 years ago

      Why "according to the MSYS2 devs" from 2014 though? Have you not tried MSYS2 yourself? I tried Cygwin a handful of years ago and it was worlds slower than MSYS, which I decided to use instead. I switched to MSYS2 a couple years ago or so, and it which hasn't felt any slower than MSYS. Cygwin took forever just to traverse a directory hierarchy. Has it has gotten an enormous speed boost since?

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