# Cygwin 25 Hacker News commenters recommended Cygwin and 17 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 23 years (3 owners). **Verdict:** Gives Windows bash, grep and other Unix tools that run natively, and many users find it reliable. The common caveats are DLL hell, slowness and hacky emulation. ## Why people recommend it - Runs bash and Unix tools on Windows (4 comments): "OneCore patched XP with MSYS2/MinGW/Cygwin with Bash, gnu tooling and the pacman package manager." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439437)) "it got you like....grep and bash and stuff that ran natively on windows which was kinda cool" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470699)) "the linux ports (cygwin, msys2, git bash) are all great to have" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48373161)) - Keeps existing scripts working unchanged (3 comments): "Cygwin was awesome though, saved me a ton of time and the client a lot of money" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472105)) "cygwin allowed me to keep the scripts as they were and trigger them in place" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470979)) "Cygwin on Windows 7 was how I computed until moving to Linux" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552442)) - Works well despite its limitations (3 comments): "using the cygwin method is supported and should be working fine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48457645)) "I even still prefer it to WSL depending on what I'm doing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649999)) "It works well, if you mind the limitiations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677071)) - Setup installer keeps packages reliable (2 comments): "I have used cygwin for 30 years and never had any dll hell issues, because all the programs came from the cygwin installer." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873623)) "Just use ssh from Cygwin. DLL hell was rarely a problem, just always install everything via setup.exe." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47861708)) ## What people warn about - Hacky emulation that slows programs (5 comments): "contains a lot of complex inefficient hacks to do things which Microsoft could do much more easily" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677243)) "Cygwin is a crazy approach, was slow (contrary to the implication of the "low cruft" claim)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47863952)) "Cygwin does many unholy things to enable signals and fork syscall in binaries." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48374830)) - DLL hell and dependency problems (2 comments): "that cygwin1.dll (plus any dependencies) is a problem for distribution." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47865764)) "The problem with Cygwin as I remember it was DLL hell." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47861600)) - Outdated packages and manual updates (3 comments): "Cygwin was also notorious for being really out of date. Security vulnerabilities and missing features were both very common at one point." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873101)) "needs to cleanly coexist side-by-side with existing Cygwin installations and optionally support silent install/upgrade/uninstall" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47868077)) "Cygwin still lacks that to this day, you have to fire up to GUI installer to update packages." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47866679)) - Linux apps need recompiling for it (2 comments): "Requiring every single Linux app developer to recompile their app using Cygwin and account for quirks that it may have is not the correct approach." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47863175)) "disentangling the build system from Unixisms that require Cygwin" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45853322)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Wine](https://hackerapproved.com/p/wine.md): 329 recommend - [Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/windows-subsystem-for-linux.md): 159 recommend - [WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/wsl2.md): 115 recommend - [WinApps](https://hackerapproved.com/p/winapps.md): 19 recommend - [Rosetta](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rosetta.md): 18 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Cygwin", https://hackerapproved.com/p/cygwin/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).