Obviously, mobile devices far outnumber desktops and laptops now (servers too), but I think conflating Android with both Linux and the Linux desktop is wrong.
The whole meme of the Linux desktop wasn't meant to say, "uses a highly modified version of the Linux kernel with a custom userland, proprietary interface, proprietary services, custom drivers, etc. The idea was not to replace one proprietary system with another mostly proprietary system that happens to have a modified version of the Linux kernel and that puts some of the software in a git repo. I do think it is telling that the most successful user-facing implementations of both Unix and Linux have had to create largely proprietary wrappers over them both.
> but I think conflating Android with both Linux and the Linux desktop is wrong
I think when people say that it's more about saying that the use case for computing in general has changed. Linux is everywhere and runs everything so the fixation on desktops is old-fashioned and not really necessary anymore.
The whole meme of the Linux desktop wasn't meant to say, "uses a highly modified version of the Linux kernel with a custom userland, proprietary interface, proprietary services, custom drivers, etc. The idea was not to replace one proprietary system with another mostly proprietary system that happens to have a modified version of the Linux kernel and that puts some of the software in a git repo. I do think it is telling that the most successful user-facing implementations of both Unix and Linux have had to create largely proprietary wrappers over them both.