On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 04:26, Zhang Weiwu
<zhangweiwu@realss.com> wrote:
On 04/18/2011 06:37 PM, Ivan Vučica wrote:
How do I make a choice?
- is your app targeted at an end-user who is primarily using Windows? MinGW
- is your app targeted at a scientist, or a hacker/hobbyist who doesn't mind installing extra software? Cygwin
Technical audience is different from a user audience, and rarely expectations match. Mac OS X has become a rare gem here, in satisfying many techies as well end-users. In that way, Lion is scaring me; despite some improvements, it appears to cater to a different user-base than Snow Leopard and previous versions.
Cygwin targets developers and technical audience, in providing an alternative to using UNIX for deeply-technical stuff. For example, you may be modding a Windows game and you need to run a UNIX utility -- you need Cygwin. MinGW and MSYS are good alternatives, until the utility you need turns out to abuse fork(), pthreads, UNIX sockets. Or it may use BSD sockets to an extent that porting to WinSock is unfeasible.
Cygwin simply isn't for day-to-day use, and that's it: end-users are not the target audience. MinGW isn't either, but it is just a compiler toolchain, so the end-user doesn't see it as he would have to see Cygwin. Neither has anything to do with antipathy towards end-users.
Of course, that does not mean there aren't massive improvements that could and should be done all over FLOSS and free platforms. Most trivial example: while dragging and dropping, I cannot use alt-tab to switch between apps in GNOME.
No, I don't have my app, never had one and doesn't plan to have one. GNUStep is a curious knowledge to me for weekend hours, just a user, not a developer:)
So you may really want to try using prepackaged binaries for a Linux distro. Alternatively, Windows packages look very nice, but you'll have to get your hands dirty and compile apps you want to use, since most apps don't ship with binaries for Windows.
Which means you'll have to make a first step towards being a developer. It's not a bad thing, y'know, especially since compiling mostly comes down to unpacking the source, and punching make+make install.