Cygwin is way older than CoLinux. CoLinux is from 2004. Cygwin was first released in 1995.

The problem with Cygwin as I remember it was DLL hell. You'd have applications (such as a OpenSSH port for Windows) which would include their own cygwin1.dll and then you'd have issues with different versions of said DLL.

Cygwin had less overhead which mattered in a world of limited RAM and heavy, limited swapping (x86-32, limited I/O, PATA, ...).

Those constraints also meant native applications instead of Web 2.0 NodeJS and what not. Java specifically had a bad name, and back then not even a coherent UI toolkit.

As always: two steps forward, one step back.

> Java specifically had a bad name, and back then not even a coherent UI toolkit.

Java was ahead of its time, now nothing has a coherent UI toolkit.

Just use ssh from Cygwin. DLL hell was rarely a problem, just always install everything via setup.exe.

The single biggest problem it has is slow forking. I learned to write my scripts in pure bash as much as possible, or as a composition of streaming executables, and avoid executing an executable per line of input or similar.

> Cygwin had less overhead which mattered in a world of limited RAM and heavy, limited swapping (x86-32, limited I/O, PATA, ...).

Maybe so, but my memory of Cygwin was waiting multiple seconds just for the Cygwin CLI prompt to load. It was very slow on my machines.

Meanwhile those that complained about Java, now ship a whole browser with their "native" application, and then complain about Google taking over the Web.