How did you make it work with Windows hosts? Apple Bonjour? Windows out of the box works fine with LLMNR, but mDNS/DNS-SD is a problem and is available only for "modern" apps, it is not integrated with system resolver.
My use case is accessing Samba shares on a Linux server from a Windows desktop, and it works with Windows Explorer and even older apps like the original Windows Media Player with no configuration or installation of any additional software.
SMB has its own discovery protocol, that powered the "Network Neighbourhood" since Windows 95 - and it is part of the deprecated SMB1, so modern Samba has a special mode, where the discovery part is enabled, but the rest is disabled. Additionally, Windows can discover SMB shares via WS-Discovery. Samba itself does not support WSD, but there are third-party utilities like wsdd, that will do it instead. Some linux-based NAS-es, like those from Synology, also ship with WSD support enabled out of the box.
My experience with Windows 10 and mDNS/DNS-SD mirrors that from the linked article. As a result, I have now a real DNS domain, with devices with their own A records :/
It's not that. I confirmed with Wireshark mDNS queries are being sent from the Windows side and answered from Linux using the Avahi service. Furthermore, web hosting I have on that Linux server also works in Firefox just by visiting the server's host name.
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-mdns-dnssd.html