I have one group I play in where there are 7-10 Players. It’s pure chaos, though since we play very infrequently and a lot of the players don’t take the game too seriously it somehow works out.

Still would not recommend unless you like roleplaying with your fellow players until you get to your turn of GM attention.

I have a lot of experience with Windows and some with Linux.

The driver problems with Laptops are not only on Linux, though it is a lot more common, depending on the manufacturer Windows also has a ton of problems if you don’t want to use the 8 year old pre-installed driver that was never updated.

And Linux is held back by (proprietary) software availability as well. Most of the time it would be Microsoft Office (a lot of people I know complain about alternatives like Google Docs or Libre Office not being up to par by a long shot). Another big thing is Games. Sure, most of them work quite well out of the box, but if they do not it would be beyond most of my friend groups skills to fix it. Not to mention the massive library of competitive games that some people play exclusively that just don’t work at all.

In fact Linux is the superior version of Factorio, since you get to have asynchronous saves that don’t pause the game

You can do the same on Windows (mount ssh shares), there is an Fuse like project for Windows: WinFsp.

I picked up Starsector again this weekend and having a blast with a modded playthrough.