Cygwin is a POSIX environment that you can run on top of Windows. It comes with most of the common Linux packages and a better terminal emulator than the god-awful CMD and Powershell.

Cygwin is the first thing you should try. It can be installed quicky and in a portable way, so it’s not risky and it doesn’t require much commitment. One of the biggest advantages of Cygwin is the X server that you can install with it.

You can find out about Cygwin here.

Accessing the Windows clipboard

You can read or write to /dev/clipboard to access the Windows clipboard from Cygwin. Of course, regular copy-paste from graphical applications just works as well.

Make the Cygwin X server listen on TCP

You can use the following command to make Cygwin listen on TCP. This can be used to run apps on virtual machines / WSL and display them on Windows. X forwarding also works well.

XWin -listen tcp -multiwindow -clipboard -silent-dup-error