[heftig]

MSYS2 is basically Cygwin with Pacman for package management, plus several other environments with either GCC or Clang and different Windows-Native C and C++ runtimes.

It's nice, but not perfect. It inherits a lot of problems from Cygwin. File access is still slow (as mentioned in other threads) and symlinks don't behave right (by default making a symlink creates a deep copy of the target, and even NTFS symlinks need to know whether the target is a file or a directory; either way you cannot create a symlink when the target is missing, and this causes rsync to fail, for example.)

MSYS2's strength is as an environment for compiling cross-platform apps for Windows, and I would recommend WSL2 for anything else.

[michaelsbradley]

Agreed that it's good for building native Windows software and there are better options for other use cases. When recommending–praising MSYS2 I sometimes forget that the only time I use Windows is to build software for use by other folks who actively run Windows as their desktop/laptop OS.

Re: "Cygwin…plus several other environments[+]", the second paragraph of MSYS2's home page summarizes it pretty well:

   Despite some of these central parts [Bash and cli tools] being based on Cygwin, the main focus of MSYS2 is to provide a build environment for native Windows software and the Cygwin-using parts are kept at a minimum.

[+] https://www.msys2.org/docs/environments/