I think we should continue to wait a while and continue doing community building. Meanwhile, one of the following might happen: * Either someone joins and fixes/maintains the Windows build, or * Windows support for *nix compatibility will become much more extensive over time I have a feeling that the second item will happen eventually, based on the trajectory of MS adopting a lot of Linux and open source stuff in general over the last few years.
So far, I don't think that they have taken a approach that makes any real sense. Cygwin and MSYS2 are a pleasure to work with under Windows because they are full integrated with windows. I use the Cygwin shell for general management of my entire Windows system. Very handy.
Things like VMs and WSL put a GNU environment in a sandbox. You can get access to files outside of WSL sandbox only via the most tortuous of paths. MSYS2, on the other hand, will let me do `ls "/c/Program Files"`. I tried using WSL a year or so ago and was not at all happy with it.
GNUWin32 and UnxUtils are ports of GNU environments to run natively on windows. The native build requires GNUWin32 currently. This are true UNIX utilities running directly on Windows. That are actually pretty nice, but are not being well maintained.
Windows NT used to support a natural POSIX environment on top of Windows, but that was discontinued rather quickly. There are a couple of other environments:
- UWIN: AT&T's POSIX support: https://github.com/att/uwin I don't think this has been maintained since 2012. - MKS Toolkit: supposedly maintained by PTC, Inc. But I don't have much information about that.
