Not long ago I built an open source program (originally written for Linux) to run under Windows (or more correctly, to run under Cygwin). Although this was just a technical exercise I was quite surprised at how well it all worked - but of course, to run the app on somebody else's PC would require them to install Cygwin - which isn't exactly a trivial task..!

I just wondered if anyone here has ever used Microsoft's POSIX Services for Windows and if so, what kind of experiences did they have? In particular, were the apps easy enough to deploy? Also (for graphical apps) was it still necessary to use some variant of 'X'?