[throwaway12757]

I was really hoping that Ubuntu Touch would have filled this market. I was excited for it to come out and then it never did.

I just wanted a phone that works as a phone and then I can plugin to a dock and I get a full linux desktop experience.

It's still a thing, but nowhere near what it was when they were trying to launch an actual phone.

https://ubports.com/devices/promoted-devices

[seba_dos1]

You can use a Librem 5 in this exact way. I do it - it's fast enough to run an IDE and do some programming (as long as the thing you work on compiles in reasonable time), check e-mail, IM and social media, do some light browsing etc. I have GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity and LMMS there, which together with Qt Creator are pretty much all the tools I need for my gamedev work - and now I can do that on my phone attached to a screen, keyboard and mouse. Jamulus, Mumble, mpd, even some lighter games and emulators - it all works, straight from Debian repos. It's pretty fun.

I have even ran a full Plasma Desktop on an external screen this way - and it worked surprisingly well even despite of GPU acceleration not being available there because of a bug.