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How to develop on Windows: comparing native, MinGW, Cygwin, WSL

Developing on Windows can be frustrating; while some development software is Windows-native or fully cross-platform, a lot of tools are made primarily for Linux. Surprisingly this even includes very popular ones like Git.

Minimal hardware access e.g. GPU, USB: While VM hosts can have some support for these (e.g. WSL2 has OpenGL and OpenCL acceleration) you won’t get the full experience. The main advantage to WSL1 over 2 is that is no virtual storage drive, making it faster to access Windows files directly. So on Windows, I prefer native builds from official sources or Scoop, falling back to Cygwin for any unsupported utilities.

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