I tried and tried to work with Vista Home to find a good alternative to Vista's SUA (Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications), and I really can't find a good alternative.  I had to shell some cash out of my own pocket to get Vista Ultimate, but I got it for cheap since I have student discount.  There are a few things that I look for when looking for a *nix in windows type of environment.  First off, I would like to have a fast shell and that it's multi-tabbed.  Reason being for this tabbed feature is that it increases my productivity by a lot!

With this particular requirement and without going into other details, I have two alternatives in windows.  One is WinTabber, the other is "Console 2".  WinTabber has very little features and has little flexibility.  With the ability to add any window to WinTabber, it's great!  The downside?  I can't load windows automatically into WinTabber.  That feature is not available yet, and development of WinTabber seems to be going at a very slow race.  What about Console 2?  This thing is slow as molasses.  Copying, pasting, moving the window, it takes forever for the window to repaint itself.  I can literally count the seconds of its reactions!

You may wonder why I want SUA over Cygwin.  Well, SUA is a posix subsystem, while Cygwin is a Win32 application on top of a Windows subsystem.  I find it amazing how the folks at Cygwin imposed a posix standard on top of a windows subsystem, I would imagine it to be very hard to do.  Altogether, I just don't think it is wise to rely on such mechanism.  Not only is it slow, but getting Cygwin to work with Windows is a lot of work, and the people at Redmond could just completely change the Windows API at any moment making it impossible for Cygwin to work.  At least with SUA, it's done by the same people, thus giving it a better chance to live longer in the long run.

I'll update on my progress working with SUA to see if I can achieve what I need to achieve.  I'll keep you (the few of you) posted of what I have done.