Jim Galasyn shows how you can try out Apache Kafka on Windows:
Is Windows your favorite development environment? Do you want to run Apache Kafka® on Windows? Thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2), now you can, and with fewer tears than in the past. Windows still isn’t the recommended platform for running Kafka with production workloads, but for trying out Kafka, it works just fine. Let’s take a look at how it’s done.
You can also get Kafka to run natively on Windows, though there are bugs around file handling, to the point where if you restart your machine while the Kafka service is running, data in partitions may become permanently inaccessible and force you to delete it before you can start Kafka again. So yeah, it’s better to use WSL or Docker containers for trying out Kafka on Windows machines.