10 engineers on Hacker News describe using Cygwin first-hand: 2 endorse it, 4 regret it, 1 are mixed.
“then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again.”
regret · personal · 1oooqooq · 2025-05-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“have been using it with Cygwin for years, zero issues. So, WSL wasn't a hard requirement.”
endorse · personal · ZoomZoomZoom · 2021-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I recommend Cygwin, I've been using it for 15 years or so... The slowest thing is forking; emulating it in Win32 executables is not easy on NT kernel.”
mixed · personal · 15 yr · barrkel · 2017-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“for Windows backups, I'm currently running it under Cygwin. But I'm not able to preserve Windows specific permissions.”
regret · personal · derekp7 · 2014-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“cygwin is a joke and you're never quite sure if the errors you're hitting are a bug or a difference”
regret · production · earl · 2012-06-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We're now shipping the Cygwin build of Redis to run on Windows, which is less than ideal.”
regret · production · tghw · 2011-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It made Windows into a bearable experience for a Unix guy.”
endorse · production · rbanffy · 2011-06-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we used plain rsync in cygwin through a Multiplatform GUI based in Qt 4.8.x.”
neutral · production · mromanuk · 2015-01-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the array assignment causes gdb to crash in Cygwin.”
neutral · personal · agrona · 2012-08-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using it daily for over three years on cygwin.”
neutral · production · 3 yr · zorander · 2010-10-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?