ROS1 is primarily used with linux unless you use a VM. ROS2 can be used on linux, mac or windows. You can also check out AWS robomaker to use ROS in the cloud.

https://wiki.ros.org https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/ https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Installation/Crystal/Windows-... https://aws.amazon.com/robomaker/

FWIW, I tried using Ros on Windows as recently as the summer but IMO the biggest issue is that 3rd party packages like those listed on the Github repo are predominantly coded for Linux. So I'd have issues with builds failing to compile if they weren't tuned to work on Windows.

I ended up just installing Ubuntu and dual booting to save me a lot of hassle.

I've never tried it, so I don't know how easy it is, but there has been a lot of work recently to improve ROS on Windows: https://microsoft.github.io/Win-RoS-Landing-Page/

Why?

Why haven't I tried ROS on Windows? I never really had the need to, I primarily use Linux at home and work.

I did briefly evaluate ROS 2 (ardent) on Windows at my previous job. It seemed to work fairly well, I built it natively, ran the demos and did some latency/throughput comparisons between DDS implementations.

While ROS2 promises windows compatibility I’m not so sure how it will turn out. Most guides, drivers and general support will focus on Linux. We’ll see how wrong I am when ROS2 finally takes off!

Are you using WSL? It's usually good enough to make linux only software run without any issues.

It's probably not very smooth and stable if you need stuff like RViz, RQt, etc.

I will add some tools that will help you work with ROS under Windows. This is definitely missing.