Cygwin

Probably the most popular way to get Linux onto a Windows system. It's not quite the same as having Linux natively but it is probably one of the easiest ways to get much of its functionality.

This tool is amazing. Unix command-line interface that can interact with Windows is the tip of the iceberg. Through Cygwin (and apt-cyg), I've installed Python, vim, an SSH server and other various Linux tools. Cygwin has access to most Windows commands such as shutdown (unlike WSL) and can launch cmd if it doesn't. It even allows me to copy files to external media even when normally restricted by the OS.

I build mingw version of gcc and Cygwin provides an very robust environment for doing that.

Incredibly useful set of software for any developer. The quality of the ports have risen to a very high level in the last several years.

I'm a Linux developer who uses Windows as my desktop OS. I need to inter-operate with Linux webservers so I'm constantly switching back and forth between desktop and remote servers. Cygwin makes it very easy to work locally using the same set of tools on the servers.

It's particularly useful for working with and processing data files "the UNIX way" with the typical suite of UNIX programs like bash, grep, cut, sed, awk, perl, python, vim, emacs, imagemagick, scp, etc.

Use with mintty (available off the install) and you've essentially got PuTTY + cygwin. Fantastic.

Great! Lets you practice on you Linux commands while in a windows environment. It can take a little getting used to due to some compatibility issues between Unix naming conventions and window's. But it still works great!