G'day bliako,

I went through this process about 18 months ago. I asked similar questions to you and, like you, I got a lot of replies. It ended up a rather long thread; read it all if you want; here's my three main posts:

• Perl on Windows 10
• Re: Perl on Windows 10 (Why macOS to MSWin?)
• Re: Perl on Windows 10 - the summary

Here's a brief, non-exhaustive, overview of features:

• The Win10+Cygwin provides a Unix environment. It's not substantially different from the Linux (OpenSUSE) machine I use for $work.
• I run bash on a mintty xterm (Cygwin64 Console). It provides a vi interface on the command line (set -o vi in ~/.bashrc). It has all the usual Unix commands and utilities.
• I have Perlbrew installed. I initially used this to install Perl 5.30.0; I subsequently used the same to upgrade to 5.32.0 and later to 5.33.5.
• I run an X Server with Cygwin XLaunch. Perl Tk programs work fine with this. (There's actually 16 X Servers available.)
• I access many open source applications via aliases: soffice file.docx (LibreOffice); foxit file.pdf (Foxit); and so on.
• I have an Apache webserver set up. Other webservers that are started by Perl web frameworks, e.g. Dancer2, also work without any problems.
• I run network-related utilities, such as ssh and git, almost every day.
• ... and so on ...

In the main, I've had no trouble installing Perl modules. One issue I had, took me a while to sort out: "cpan: Terminal does not support AddHistory.". With another, I needed help from fellow monks: "Update XML::LibXML - can't find "xlocale.h"".

There's a number of open source applications that I access directly from Win10: Firefox; Thunderbird; Vlc; and others.

I use this setup five days a week for $work; and seven days a week for my own projects. Overall, I'm very happy with what I have.

I felt this was getting overly long; I could've written a lot more. Please ask if you have any specific questions about things I haven't touched on, or areas where you'd like further details.