Cygwin alternative?
Posted by charley_chimp@reddit | linuxadmin | View on Reddit | 3 comments
I know I'm going to get crucified here, but I'm doing it anyway. Does anyone have a good cygwin alternative? I had a great workflow with cygwin that I'd like to replicate minus cygwin, I've been having too many issues with it lately (gems not updating correctly, vagrant suddenly dying, etc.).
I really mostly used it for git, vagrant, tmux & the ssh client. Anyone else stuck on Windows have something to suggest?
ThingSuch8803@reddit
May I suggest MinC (Is Not Cygwin). I started it from scratch. It runs OpenBSD 6.1 on your Windows machine. Apps like git, vim, nano, mutt, rsync (remote only) already work nicely. I'm still working on a crucial function to make daemons, local rsync and tmux work, but I need to know if there is any interest at all.
https://minc.commandlinerevolution.nl/english/home.html
charley_chimp@reddit (OP)
Woah 8 years later!
Out of curiosity, what advantages does your project have over simply using native WSL2 with how much momentum there is in that space?
ThingSuch8803@reddit
As stated on the home page, it began as a tool to teach Linux to children. I wanted the learning experience to be like the Cisco Packet Tracer, which they also use for their networking classes.
Also, I wanted a Cygwin alternative for myself. I tried using Linux for a while. In my opioion, it still sucks at the desktop. For instance, what is up with these super-grainy fonts? I ended up with using a Linux version in VirtualBox and ssh-ing into that. But then I had to move my files to the Linux VM and syncing them all the time. It is wierd to move the files to the tools instead of the other way 'round.
Anyway, OpenBSD on Windows is magical. They have a heavily modified version of make, resulting in an automated build process. Instead of struggeling with the GNU autotools (configure, make, install) per package, you can just build a whole directory of tools at once with one make command. They call it 'ports'.
So did you find an alternative which you can use on Windows? Or do you just use WSL?