CMake is wonderful on Linux, the problem on Windows is it can’t always find the library since the user could have installed them anywhere. To get it to find the boost library with the CMake-GUI add a new variable BOOST_ROOT of type Path and set the parameter to the boost home directory.
CMake uses a set of modules to locate common library and you can specify the root of these directly. See the documentation at https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.0/manual/cmake-modules.7.html