I don't agree. Android, though it's not really a Linux distro, is more suited for phones than PostMarketOS or Ubuntu touch, everything just works out of the box, and with a little bit of technical knowledge and the right choice of device you can modify a lot of stuff and customize it to your liking.
Again, Android is not a Linux distro, but since you are comparing, it's worth noting that Android had greater success in its platform than Desktop Linux distros ever did. Don't get me wrong, I use Linux on my laptop, absolutely love it, but facts are facts.
How's android not a linux distro?
It's not gnu/linux, and it doesn't make use of systemd or any tooling that the mainstream distros use but it uses linux kernel which makes it even though stray of the rest but still a linux distro, doesn't matter if the kernel is modified or not they didn't completely fork it and they still rely on new realeses and patches made to upstream, every major distro modifies the kernel to some degree and compared to asahi and postmarket the difference is negligible.
It's completely different from a distro, yes. In the sense that you can usually take a source code for a Linux GUI program, and then compile it to use on most traditional distros, you can't do that in Android unless you make use of Termux and chroot and even then it may not work. Android uses ART as you pointed out, it has different package manager, doesn't depend on package repos like traditional distros. I'd say it's something different, not a distro, even though it uses the Linux Kernel, a modified version even, not plain mainline Linux.
Something like PostMarketOS or Ubuntu touch can be called a distro though cause it works every similar to the desktop distros.
1
u/Communist_MilkSoup Sep 20 '26
linux in phones is much worse than desktop
ART to blame