Winston, You're forgetting about VirtualBox... You get the best of both worlds - a real, working Windows install running on top of NIX... Wine, OTOH, is hit or miss sometimes... Everything I've tried on FreeBSD (with/without linux emulation) has been a miss....
OK i'll give you that... but... We run Hypervisors all the time - most of what I do is cloud and virtual infrastructure for traders and quant firms. Bigger stuff, not just a one-off box. Those screen shots were actually off my VMware ESXi "lab server". We also use Hyper-V and some Citrix. I have a VMware Workstation license which I used to use (like virtual box but paid) but now that I can spin up a VM in 2-3 minutes it's easier to just go that route. In my experience, overlaying a Hypervisor (the thing that runs virtual machines) on top of a secondary operating system is very slow, system resource heavy and buggy. Also, the OP never mentioned why he runs MINT... but if you run VirtualBox (or equivalent) You are still dealing with the COA and licensing issues - why not just run a Microsoft operating system in the first place. It's hard to spread a virtual instance (from VB) across multi monitors and pass-through is spotty at times, etc. WINE and Cygwin are command line for the most part. I don't know what he's doing but if he pays for TT he should be able to call customer support and get an answer. The difference between Virtual Box/Hypervisors and WINE/Cygwin are at the OS level vs. an application level. VirtualBox runs a whole operating system. I love BSD, use it a bunch for firewalls (pfSense) as well as storage (FreeNAS) and a few other applications. BSD is pretty specific and very hard/buggy/spotty depending on what you are trying to do with it. It is a great and stable operating system though.
Yeah! Can you believe they made an OS called Windows? Named after things that break? I can't imagine anyone buying a copy.