> In my mind, Microsoft developed WSL to try to keep developers: if you grew up on Linux but are now employed maintaining Windows servers, WSL gives you a way to get to your shell of choice
IMO Cygwin did that well enough before WSL.
I "grew up on Linux" (starting back in the day when it came on a stack of floppies and nobody knew what it was) and I've always installed Cygwin on all Windows systems where I had admin privileges. It worked fairly well for command line stuff.
Cygwin is slow at things like process creation, I think, which made shell scripts slow. Plus, cygwin was its own environment that required some porting, or, at least, recompiling to get apps to work. The new Linux subsystem runs Linux binaries at something like full speed (to the extent that I've played with it).
I am using WSL on my new box, but also have Cygwin installed. Cygwin is night and day worse than WSL. But I have to have Cygwin installed to get CLion to work.
I look forward to the day when MingW and Cygwin can be replaced with the far nicer WSL alternative. It really is mostly seamless, and very fast.
IMO Cygwin did that well enough before WSL.
I "grew up on Linux" (starting back in the day when it came on a stack of floppies and nobody knew what it was) and I've always installed Cygwin on all Windows systems where I had admin privileges. It worked fairly well for command line stuff.