Great article! Very helpful as additional information to this article:
I might just move this to Community Guides.
One thing to note though:
On Linux, it just works™. Linux systems in general rarely need rebooting to do anything.
And to edit the hosts file, all you need to do is save the file and it works.
Are you sure you need to flush DNS cache on Windows though? On Linux, the hosts file bypasses DNS lookups entirely, so even if you have a local DNS cache, the hosts file overrides even cached items.