WSL1 was a reimplementation of Linux system calls and offered most of what modern tools needed. WSL2 is a complete Linux kernel/distro running in a Hyper-V virtual machine.

Cygwin is no longer needed when you have real Linux.

>Cygwin is no longer needed when you have real Linux.

I'd say that depends on your use case.

For many folks, WSL is an excellent idea. I've played around with it and it doesn't give me anything over what I already have using Cygwin.

Also, Cygwin+userland is much lighter weight than an integrated VM like WSL2.

A lot of the question is what you want/need. I need a decent shell with a fairly complete unix userland. X is nice to have as well. That such functionality seamlessly integrates with Windows is great.

But I don't need a dev environment (although Cygwin provides that as well) for unix on my Windows box.

I'm sure there are other use cases/software that requires a full blown Linux kernel/environment, but they don't apply to me. I just use VMs (on separate hardware) for that.

And unless you actually need a full-blown kernel, rather than a specific set of tools, cygwin provides a lightweight, mature and well supported alternative.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that Cygwin is unix. Rather, I say that for a significant set of use cases, Cygwin can be a superior solution.

It all depends on your requirements.

This this this.

I also find that, for me, cygwin is a better solution for what I want: A bash shell and a decent set of unix-like command-line tools, that (critically) uses the same filesystem as Windows programs do.

I've honestly been kind of perplexed by all the excitement around WSL. A lot of people seem to say they want it for "development", by which I guess they mean web development. And I could see WSL being a nice alternative to running a full Linux VM for web development. But I don't do web development (mostly). I just want a unix-like shell and tools on my Windows box. And I don't want to have to think about whether the files I'm creating and working on live in Linux-land or Windows-land.

As stated, WSL2 is a full Linux VM. It's a real Linux kernel which means you have 100% compatibility for all Linux tools instead of workaround Cygwin.

Also the filesystem access is shared. That's why WSL is a separate thing, otherwise you could always just run a VM yourself. WSL lets you easily browse files, operate on the same files, and even call processes and pipe results across both sides.