What is the recommended OS for compiling a Windows binary for Litecoin? I'd like to compile Litecoin for Windows, but have difficulties doing so. To be specific: I want to create the Windows executable (.exe) GUI (qt) Litecoin client (to be more specific I want to compile the executable for an alt-coin based on litecoin, but the code base is the same as litecoin).

Many tutorials are either focused on compiling for Linux, or they focus on Bitcoin compiling, which is a bit different nowadays than Litecoin. Rather than explaining my specific problems, which are likely unique to my situation, I was wondering what a recommended Operating System (and version) is to compile Litecoin? Who has specific (preferably smooth) experience building the GUI litecoin client for Windows?

A useful relevant topic is this one:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149479.0

But this is based on bitcoin, not litecoin. This referenced tutorial has a bit on Windows, but it's not too optimistic:


  Windows -Qt
  
  This is the trickiest one to crack of the GUI wallets. I am going to
  detail how I got this to work and offer you an easy way to get the
  dependencies in an attempt to make this work for you too. That said,
  it may not–and I’ve already said I won’t do tech support. So here’s
  the deal. I got this to work and then duplicated it on a second
  machine to ensure it wasn’t a fluke! Most of the information needed to
  compile the basic coind.exe or GUI wallet is in this thread:
  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149479.0 Unfortunately nothing
  is as easy as it seems, and although the MinGW and QT installs went
  fine, I couldn’t compile it without a few tweaks to the .pro file.


In this tutorial, Windows is used to create the executable, but I understand one can also use Linux to create Windows executables, right? There are few experiences documenting successful or smooth compiling of Litecoin (forks) for Windows, so I was wondering if people do have good experiences doing so and what kind of OS or approach they used.
The Litecoin source tree, in the doc/ folder, provides a file regarding building on Windows, using MinGW and MSYS. I can't personally vouch for those instructions, never having used them myself, so if you go that route, good luck. The way that the release binaries are built, if I'm not mistaken, is using the Gitian builder. If you're looking to do a Windows build, I would try that. If you want to actually use Gitian, you can clone the repo, and use the readme file to get Gitian set up, and then follow the build segment of the release process to do the actual build. On the other hand, if you're not necessarily looking for determinism or the ability to reproduce the exact build, you could try taking a look at the Gitian build scripts to see what packages are being used, what commands are run, et cetera, and try to reproduce that on a Linux system.