There is no "recommended alternative" to dnsmasq that I'm aware of. Dnsmasq works perfectly fine for it's purpose. You can set the TTL of local responses from a dnsmasq server with the local-ttl option.
I don't know of any technical basis for the claim that "Windows is [...] more aggressive in caching DNS responses than Linux" -- as far as I know, both operating systems respect the TTL provided to them. Any attempt to do otherwise is severely broken. The only possibility I can think of is that you are attempting to state that most Linux distributions don't pre-install a caching DNS resolver -- which is true, but ultimately irrelevant. If you do not have a suitable caching resolver on your local network, you can install one of your choosing. I use dnscache, from djbdns, which works wonderfully.
There is no "recommended alternative" to dnsmasq that I'm aware of. Dnsmasq works perfectly fine for it's purpose. You can set the TTL of local responses from a dnsmasq server with the
local-ttloption.I don't know of any technical basis for the claim that "Windows is [...] more aggressive in caching DNS responses than Linux" -- as far as I know, both operating systems respect the TTL provided to them. Any attempt to do otherwise is severely broken. The only possibility I can think of is that you are attempting to state that most Linux distributions don't pre-install a caching DNS resolver -- which is true, but ultimately irrelevant. If you do not have a suitable caching resolver on your local network, you can install one of your choosing. I use dnscache, from djbdns, which works wonderfully.