I run a fair amount of *nix software on my Windows machine - not because it's easy, but because it has become apparent that this die-hard Mac user needs a more diverse portfolio (for personal reasons; I have successfully avoided Windows for my entire career to date). In fact, it's quite difficult compared to running the same software on macOS, which isn't too surprising since macOS is generally considered to be a member of the *nix family, while Windows is not.
This document contains a random bag of things that will cut you as you attempt to cross the streams, and also the occasional tip or trick.
- There are many choices of 'environments' for building / running things, such as: MSYS2, Cygwin, Anaconda, VCPKG, WSL. They can be used concurrently (with important caveats; keep reading), and the correct one to use for a given task likely depends on compatability requirements of the software you're making or using.
- path handling is a mess (WSL purports to ease this pain some