Add a bunch of fat, semi-desktop binaries that actually provide some kind of functionality to make it remotely comparable, and then you just have a worse, fatter system that runs hot and wastes the battery.
Android is a unified system working together to make the device race to sleep as fast as possible, with as few wakeups as feasible (e.g. batch together events that would wake up the device).
Lighter as SXMO will run on a low budget 1GB of RAM armv7 handheld released in 2014 (maybe even 512MB of RAM), even without 3D acceleration and Android 17 just won't, no matter how much you tweak it
And what? I mean, I can also just run Linux on a raspberry pi and connect a screen to it. That in itself will have zero relevant features, it's a Linux with a screen that you can toy around with, not a phone.
I've been using openbox for over a decade. That's completely false. Xfce is not a memory hog. And it's not minimal either it's fully functional.
Gnome is a bloated mess of a thing and I hate it. Why would anyone want their desktop to use over 1gb of ram. I have a 32gb laptop and I still loath the idea of throwing away memory on such a bloated awful thing.
It doesn't run GNOME Shell, which is the main memory hog of GNOME.
It uses some GNOME services, namely so it doesn't have to invent it's own. None of these services are memory heavy and all have a purpose (e.g. managing Bluetooth)