Adoption on desktop is 100% more related to Steam support, at least in the gaming segment.
Anecdotally, among friends and colleagues, people are only staying with Windows for gaming support.
People generally dislike Windows but are forced to stay their for gaming. As support for Linux improves, they'll be less willing to put up with Windows' BS.
Android is a Linux distribution unlike any other. They use a completely different framework for drivers for hardware, they have their own patches for binder and other things that see no use outside of Android and will never get upstreamed. They have their own libc which is not used in any other distro. Very little of the work that has been done to make Linux work better on Androids has benefited the rest of the Linux ecosystem. Even the WiFi/Bluetooth drivers, which is a massive shame.
Binder has been part of the mainline kernel for quite a while.
Also drivers for things on Android are for the most part done by third party manufactures and so its up to those third parties to upstream them. No different than any other driver used on more generic PC or server HW.
Also you realize that there's like 3 or 4 different libc projects for Linux distros to use right? Bionic isn't special in that regard.
>They use a completely different framework for drivers for hardware
No, both use kernel modules or statically compiled code for the part of the driver that actually talk to the hardware.
>they have their own patches for binder
Binder is part of mainline Linux, but yes I guess technically there are some patches that are related to binder, but remember that Android works on a mainline kernel.
Android uses the Linux kernel and keeps up with upstream to some extent.
macOS uses the XNU kernel.
Though as a user that likes having control over the software, I recognize that not having GNU/Linux being number one is a bit of a waste. (though one weekend of fighting NVIDIA and wayland tamed that quite a bit. Somehow my DE does not load with the proprietary driver unless I also load nouveau for some strange reason).
> though one weekend of fighting NVIDIA and wayland tamed that quite a bit
Looking back on that, this was mostly self-inflicted (used Debian testing rather than stable, and upgraded from Bullseye to Bookworm then to testing rather than clean install). I like twinkering a bit so I don't mind the pain that much but this is absolutely not representative of what new users would experience: my comment was clearly wrong (cannot edit/remove unfortunately).
This is not telling at all for regular stable distributions (Debian stable, Fedora). In general I had pretty good experiences with clean installations of those.
Anecdotally, among friends and colleagues, people are only staying with Windows for gaming support.
People generally dislike Windows but are forced to stay their for gaming. As support for Linux improves, they'll be less willing to put up with Windows' BS.