Most of what you said are compatibility issues, for what I understood with a software (ThrottleStop) and with some pieces of hardware (like the wireless device). All of that is true and fall onto what I said, we are forced to windows because stuff is developed for windows a lot more, not because windows is good. The vicious cycle: More users on windows > people/companies develops for windows > people use windows because it has the software they want > more users on windows... and so on...
Now about the lack of compatibility with laptops, that's just not true anymore (like years now). Everything like sleep, close lid, battery management, low battery warnings and actions all will work on Linux. What may happen is that the manufacturer of the laptop may have used a very cheap board that has not linux support on driver side. It is not an OS fault, but it still affects how viable the OS is for many people.
Back on the main topic, retroarch is just that many times. Lots of people are on retroarch, so developers release stuff with that in mind, so more people end up using retroarch and the thing go on in that cycle. Even that you can make emulators cores work otherwise, regular users like the ready to go solution much more.
They're compatibility issues and UI issues that shouldn't exist. A great many things on Linux are made far more complicated than they should be because "command lines are how we've always done it". There's very little effort to make things simpler or more accessible because that's not how open-source works.
It's part of the reason Android is so maligned to them. It's a Linux OS that's easily accessible. You'll hear about how "terrible" it is from the Linux community at large because it... actually provides things to you and lets you alter things in an interface that isn't from 1976.
A good example of how disgusting the open-source community can act at times can be seen with Audacity, the audio editing program. It applies an audio effect called "dynamic range compression"
without your permission every time you process audio. Any attempt to inquire about it leads to a disgusting wall of "IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, RECOMPILE THE PROGRAM YOURSELF WITHOUT IT!!!" as if you're being unreasonable
for asking for an audio editing program to actually function the way it should.
Best part? Well this is another thing with Audacity. Their instructions on how to compile it are
tediously long and
don't even work. Yep. You can follow every step to a T, you're not compiling that. You'll get ignored or berated for ever pointing that out. Or this gets to the other part of the open-source community:
severe hatred for Windows users. Audacity's community, and I've seen this with quite a few open-source projects, outright brag about how much they hate Windows and its users to the point of having nonsense instructions "to frustrate them" or making the programs just not run properly on Windows.
A similar scenario is the screen recorder OBS. They've obstinately resisted any attempt to have a recording morph to the frame rate of the program and only let you pick pre-selected standards. If programs like Afterburner and so on can read frame rates, why can't OBS? Why do I have to then process my file afterwards for effective telecining/etc. that shouldn't even exist just because I have to use a "nearest neighbor" frame rate?
Open source projects can be great but the communities are way too often utter trash because you have a den of people who feel like living deities because they're not a big corporation and they provide a product
to you, not
for you.
Boards do not differ very much. We're not in an era with many manufacturers and different ways to do things (of course as I say this, Dell is trying to push a new RAM standard for laptops... *sigh*), there's only a few making things. If there's a Linux not supporting some boards it's begging a question why, because it's not going to differ very much in function or form than any others.
It did do better than my usual PPSSPP Emulator.
