If you're asking about being able to do the same things on Windows as you could on Linux, then it takes a bunch of work to set up, and has some substantial hole

If you're asking about being able to do the same things on Windows as you could on Linux, then it takes a bunch of work to set up, and has some substantial holes in it. You basically have three options: cygwin, Linux VM, or the new Linux subsystem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux) I use a mix of cygwin and "native" tools depending on whether the language has multi-platform support. It's good enough for most purposes (Python stuff mostly), but not so good if you want POSIX threads in your C++ code, and so on. But, for example, if you're trying to do game programming, arguably the tooling on Windows is substantially better. Basically, it's maybe 70% good and highly depends on what tools you need.