it's just sluggish on the same hardware. I think the only relatively decent experience I had with it was during the 1703 era, I remember running it on a Celeron N3050 (Braswell) with 4GB RAM and playing emulated games on it with an OG Xbox controller. fun times.
and yeah, 8.1 would be a great way to go for gamers, had there not been so much stigmatisation surrounding it and the fact a lot of older stuff doesn't work on OSes above Win7.
the day Linux gets half-decent official NVIDIA driver support, which will probably come later than CEN64 reaching 100% compatibility with all N64 hardware... will be the day everyone can finally dump Windows for good, but... ordinary people who aren't part of the 'cultured' side of the Internet (don't forget, your average TikTok thot doing dumb 'autism challenges' or angry old religious guy surfing the internet count as PC users too if they use a PC) count towards influencing trends for big companies to support what they want. those people are never going to bother to grasp something like Linux, and will just deal with Windows 10 and its issues because it gives them 'convenience' not to configure things themselves too much or look things up on websites that you interact with much in the same way as you would on the 'cultured' 00s Internet.