My suspicion is that mobile vs desktop is to the most part a divide that aligns with a divide between consumer and producer. And treating customers as consumers allows you to turn general purpose computers into narrow purpose ones, where you can milk the customer for every little thing that allows them to do what they want. While this sucks from the perspective of the user, it is very much a way to grow a revenue when you are selling an Operating System as part of your products.

I don't say you can't produce things on smart phones, it is just a more restricted environment with things dumbed down, partly for reasons of target demographic, partly for reasons of screen size.

And thus the rise of mobile incentivizes companies ever so slightly to make the desktop more like their mobile counterpart.

In this space open source operating systems (or desktop environments) can be totally uncompromising. They don't need to nudge you into spending money/attention in places that are not in your interest. They don't bolt everything down and pretend to know better than you. In short, they treat you like an adult (producer) and not like a child (consumer).

And that is refreshing.