How are all the AOSP-based OSes, like for instance GrapheneOS, not Linux distros?
Lots of distros don’t use systemd, and a few non-AOSP distros don’t use GNU userland or glibc, Alpine for one.
glibc is key here, it’s what most linux distros use. One of Google’s vendor-lock moves was to start using their own libc implementation, making it incompatible with everything else.
I can imagine that theirs is safer and more suited for targeted devices. Linux is extremely generalistic and has a ton of cruft.
But I have never looked at their code or tried to port a Linux app to Android. The #Krita devs might have some insight here.
There are apps made for linux that don’t work with android, and there are apps made for android that don’t work with linux. That’s enough for me to consider them different
Also android just doesn’t use the basic mainline kernel which is what most people want when they say “linux phone”
