Emacs binary or msys2 or wsl2

I know there are many posts that are similar but they are dated. Given PGTK and WSL2, technology support has improved I wanted to **summarize my experience** and **get feedback from the community on their experiences** in stability and performance. These are now the available methods I see to install Emacs on Windows: 1. [Binary from Berkeley FTP](http://mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-28/) (general compilation & slower performance) 2. [msys2 binary from Berkeley FTP](http://mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-28/) (faster with native compilation) 3. Native compilation with "master" release (29.0.x) using msys2 (native compilation with customization + ImagicMagick for eg.) 4. WSL2 using package manager (general compilation, no GUI) 5. Source compilation on WSL2 (custom compilation, with GUI, uses 2 containers) *If using binary on Windows,* 1. Fast performance 2. Windows support poor in drawing and refresh 3. Missing Linux commands produce some inconsistency in experience *If compiled or using msys2,* 1. Faster performance 2. Windows support poor in drawing and refresh 3. Instability of Emacs (part native, part cygwin) and missing Linux commands 4. Magit is slow 5. File access is smooth *If WSL2,* 1. Slow performance 2. Smoother windows performance 3. Instability - random crashes 4. Magit kicks ass 5. Windows files more jarring to access 6. Networking issues especially if on a VPN 7. Copy and paste is not native (hacks available) The best experience I've had thus far is native compilation of Emacs 29 with msys2, but while the performance is good, I am running into issues with 'Too many files open' after editing multiple projects (which is not LSP or Magit). What's working for you?

I get far better performance with wsl2 at work, but still have to use the windows binary a lot of the time to connect with some proprietary tools. I’m currently using the version from scoop but previously used one I built through msys2. The windows binary is better than nothing, but I’ve had to strip down my packages on the windows version to just the essentials.

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I found this very helpful if you want to consider it, https://emacsredux.com/blog/2021/12/19/using-emacs-on-windows-11-with-wsl2/

Are you using a Vanilla configuration? I'm using Doom

I am using doom, and really it’s the byte compiling that really drags on in windows, but it’s mostly fine when it gets going. Im also doing windows 10

I'm going through this hell right now on the native windows side. Managed to compile emacs29 natively but have two issues I am stumped with. PNG's don't display despite the right dll's being in image-library-alist, and pdfs also don't display. Both are essential for org-mode usage. If anybody has this working would love to troubleshoot with a some help. Apart from that, it's very fast!

I had this problem but it was because I compiled it with ImageMagick support now available in 29. So I recompiled without it and boom png working beautifully. Not tested PDFs.

Thanks so much! PNG's working now. Onto PDF tools.

Tried all three because magit was so slow. like 3x slower than on Linux. turns out the problem is the filesystem and the virus scanner. cannot be fixed

I started using vc-mode on Windows just because of this. I am on Linux now and still use vc-mode for most basic tasks.