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From: Paul <nospam@needed.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.comp.os.windows-11,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: This Is Why They Say Windows Is A Great OS -- If Your Time Is
 Worth Nothing
Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2025 22:12:24 -0500
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On Wed, 1/1/2025 7:19 PM, rbowman wrote:
> On 1 Jan 2025 21:14:06 GMT, Frank Slootweg wrote:
> 
>>   As to Cygwin, for my personal use, Windows programs and all GNU tools
>> is the best combination, ever since early 2003. WSL came way too late
>> for me considering to switch to it.
> 
> I don't think it has been maintained in a while but there was a native 
> Windows build of Unix utilities that didn't depend on Cygwin or MSYS2. I 
> get tired of typing ls and finding nothing there.
> 
> I haven't used Cygwin recently. Speaking of way too late I started with 
> DJGPP which ported gcc to Windows. There were two threads growing out of 
> that. Corrina Vinschen and others took the Cygwin branch which more to 
> create a Unix environment of Windows while Colin Peters, and later Mumit 
> Khan took the mingw32 branch to use gcc to build native Windows programs 
> that became MSYS2 over the years. It was an interesting era.
> 
> At work we used the MKS NutCracker tools to port what were originally AIX 
> programs to Windows. While Cygwin would have probably worked it would have 
> gotten into the whole GPL limitations on commercial software morass. 
> 

That's gnuwin32.

   https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html

Example of a package. Has multiple download components, and
you have to do something about %PATH% if you expect full integration.
I run these in portable mode (English translation "I don't follow
the instructions") .

   https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm

Requires a bit of skill in terms of getting them set up to run.

Note that on Windows 11, the nice dyndll response of the past is missing.
On previous Windows, running an EXE that was missing a dynDLL, the loader
would tell you the DLL that was missing. You'd put it next to the EXE,
and it would tell you the next DLL that was missing. In this way,
you could assemble all the dependencies. Windows 11 seems to be all or nothing.
But it is easy enough to test, by moving a DLL and see what happens.

Static compiling seems to be better for consumers, but not many do it.
And look at SNAPS, if you want to see the ultimate level of bloating
-- as the size of the package increases (gnome desktop SNAP), the
wasted download bandwidth increases enormously.

I still use at least one gnuwin32 regularly. That's gawk.exe .
I have other things I can run, like bash shell. The difference
between gnuwin32 gawk.exe and bash shell gawk, is the line endings.
Gnuwin32 uses native Windows line termination, while bash shell
uses Linux line termination, and a tiny mod must be made to
your script, if moving it.

Cygwin is yet another environment, with a decidedly mixed bag of
namespaces. But it's nothing to freak out about. That
gives you a Windows.exe and you refer to /dev/sda when
picking the first disk drive :-) It depends on the person
doing the port, as to what they support or what throws
a warning so you know what just happened.

   Paul