I built my perfect Windows dev environment inside a virtual machine

I’ve been a Windows user for decades, and have used the OS series for most of my workloads, be it gaming, testing new hardware, or even writing articles such as this one. However, I’m not too fond of burdening my daily driver with too many apps, especially when said applications lie on the coding side. Conflicting packers are a hundred times more annoying to troubleshoot on Windows than on Linux, and I’d rather not pollute my system with a barrage of packages and dependencies.