After using decent operating systems, having to use Windows might be quite the challenge. Luckily, there are band-aids made by fellow UNIX-ers.

Package management

Cygwin

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.

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

Scoop

Scoop is a package manager for Windows applications. It can be found at scoop.sh

WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

WSL is a way to run Linux inside Windows. Instead of working like a Virtual Machine, it works in a similar way to Wine. WSL can run Linux distros like Ubuntu and Arch, and comes with all of their packages.