I'm a Linux person but often at work due to decades of Gates's effective brainwashing I almost always have to use windows on the desktop. IBM was the only exception. That said, on windows, all I do is get this https://git-scm.com/download/win run the installer and yes it installs stuff but it's literally all automatic. So it's easy on Windows and on Linux, Mac I don't know, I don't do Apple products.

thb that "half of a unix" usually weights less than some other popular runtime envs

Not really.

https://gitforwindows.org/

From that page: "Git for Windows provides a BASH emulation used to run Git from the command line. *NIX users should feel right at home, as the BASH emulation behaves just like the "git" command in LINUX and UNIX environments."

That's correct, it works automatically and is great to fix windows (when I have to work on windows) so it has some functionality but even if all I used out of that was git, it's easy. Is it all one exe? No. Does it need to be? No.

Git BASH (from that page) is what they referred to when they said "you literally have to bring half of a whole unix with you to run git".

Yeah that’s a feature.

Or instead of only half you can bring it whole with WSL2.

Except that pretty much all cmdline scripts on Windows are either .bat or .ps scripts, which in turn have tons of Window-isms built into them.

If you are using bash on Windows that just tells me that the software you build probably won't be integrated all that well with Windows ;)

(git and other "UNIX-y" tools work mostly fine on cmd.exe btw)

"If you are using bash on Windows that just tells me that the software you build probably won't be integrated all that well with Windows ;)"

Microsoft (you may have heard of them) seems to disagree: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/azure-cli-learn-...

Azure is predominantly running Linux VMs, so that kinda reinforces my point. When targeting Linux, a UNIX shell is obviously the better choice.

CLI and GUI are different languages that are optimal for different use-cases. A dev who doesn't understand that and refuses to use CLI where appropriate is like a dev who would refuse to learn English. They are crawling when others can run.

"CLI and GUI are different languages"

CLI and GUI are User Experience (UX) paradigms. I do agree the CLI is supremely critical to most software development efforts.

Not for me, as Windows developers don't need to depend on UNIX culture.

The only thing that is debatable is using command prompt instead of powershell, unless for legacy scripts.

"Windows developers don't need to depend on UNIX culture."

Need to? No. Microsoft seems to think the UNIX culture is very important to them and to their products and WSL has achieved wide success:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about#:~:text=....

There was "Microsoft POSIX Subsystem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

There was "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix"

The first Microsoft OS was a UNIX variant called Xenix "The first operating system publicly released by the company was a variant of Unix announced on August 25, 1980. Acquired from AT&T through a distribution license, Microsoft dubbed it Xenix": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft

So lets put this in perspective.

Windows NT only got the bare minimum POSIX support for Windows NT to be allowed into DoD contracts. It was barely improved from there, and its SUA replacement was hardly any better.

Mostly ignored by Windows developers and finally put to sleep in 2003.

Xenix, which was actually my first UNIX experience, predates Windows 3.x success, and was largely ignored as Microsoft decided to focus on MS-DOS and OS/2.

WSL exists, because Microsoft realised plenty of people don't care about Linux, and rather buy Apple hardware for a POSIX experience, and since Linux kernel ABI matters more than POSIX in modern times, so WSL it is.

One needs to sell that Linux Desktop experience, that is taking decades to move percentiles.

None of that is relevant for Windows developers targeting Win32, and .NET technologies, the crown jewels.