What even is "Linux Desktop" and why does Android not qualify as one? Many Android tablets (especially those with Samsung Dex) can certainly double up as desktops if its users were so willing, at least a lot more so than the Steam Deck.

Linux Desktop is something else. When Adobe considers if it's worth to port Photoshop to run on the Linux Desktop they don't include the market share of Android devices in that calculation. It's two completely different markets: desktop Linux apps and Android apps.

> What even is "Linux Desktop" and why does Android not qualify as one?

A desktop is a computer that sits on your desk, as opposed to being held in your hand. In concrete terms, you can install Android Firefox on ChromeOS, and it runs fine. But it is near unusable because it turns out how people interact with desktops is very different to how people interact with phones.

Also, desktop window managers tend to look like a protocol, rather than a library. That because every language can speak a protocol, but a library is written in one language and if you are lucky, someone many have provided bindings to that library to the language you are using.

Android's display is effectively a Java library. If you want to talk to it from C or Python, you have to FFI to Java, which sucks from a number of perspectives. It's not how you would implement a general purpose desktop environment, and I've never met anyone who considers it to be one.

That lack of flexibility shows up in a number of other ways. For example it's not difficult to implement an phone OS interface using XWindows or Wayland. Neither particularly care what window manager is running on top of them them. The reverse isn't true. You can't provide a the multi-window desktop environment on Android as it stands.

None of this is true for ChromeOS. It uses Wayland under the hood, and so you can install and run Debian GUI apps on it. In fact I do that, and it mostly works as you would expect. Thus I consider ChromeOS to be true Linux Desktop environment, and it should be counted as one. It isn't mind you - but I think should be.

Google seems to be in the process of replacing ChromeOS with Android, and as part of that process ChromeOS's ability to run Linux desktop apps is being ported to Android. If and when that happens, then I'd consider Android to be Linux desktop too.