No, this is the way it is for Maya in general

All roach105 is saying is that if you wanna render in your regular Maya render view, ( this is known as the software renderer), you have to choose a particle render type that has the little S/W after the name.

All others need to be rendered via the Hardware Render Buffer.

Check the docs for rendering certain particle types by looking in the RENDERING and also the DYNAMICS sections of the docs

It will explain all there Good luck!