If it makes tracking hard to impossible then its BASED
But it does not make tracking impossible and only a little harder. From privacy standpoint it's like using manditory VPN hosted by your carrier. And as we know, you must trust your VPN provider to not log.
And is it worth it? I would much more prefer to have real IP address and be able to host things in my house, including a full speed I2P node that would really make "tracing impossible". Someone needs to host such nodes.
have CGNAT on carrier side and add little tiny more work to track people
have public IP, making it easier to selfhost, to build P2P networks, to use anonymizing network like I2P, to host Tor nodes, to reach out to friend without central approved big tech cloud, that you can still hide with your own NAT or by using VPN
Like ability to install different desktop enviroment?
I have a phone with PostmarketOS installed and, besides being immature for now, the difference in possibilities are night and day.
Almost all apps store settings in easy to backup .config folder. I can really script things using cron jobs and plain bash. Develop apps with any programming language without stupid SDK. Carry portable Minecraft of Factorio server for LAN parties. Use literally the exact same apps on both phone and desktop without ports and having their data synced. I can talk for hours.
Being able to practially develop anything without running Google's proprietary build of Android SDK can be enough for devs to see the difference.
It might be very similar on the surface, for casual person installing app from appstore. But the whole ecosystem above the Linux kernel and below app interface is barely comparable. No Flatpak, Wayland, SystemD, glibc, PipeWire, etc.
The way apps are build, most of the times does not matter what kernel is at the bottom. What matters are toolings and the ecosystem.
Android could be build on Windows NT and most won't notice (remember Windows Phone? Not looking at UI/UX design, it felt really similar), yet we wouldn't call Android as being the same as Windows.
A modified kiosk versions. Many Chomebooks cannot boot normal/main Linux. Those are mostly drivers, so less modified than Android where big things are changed but still.
Those are just tutorials showing how to install something. Typing flatpak install firefox is one and the same as going into the app store, searching for Firefox and clicking "install". Tutorial websites would just show terminal as it's more universal.
If they ask you to actually download some file there is something very wrong.
I often see people overwhelmed by universality of some things. Instead of searching "How to install Firefox on Linux?" what should be learned is "How to install software on Linux?" and, unless met with something badly ported, never do the search again.
But what my meme is about is Windows-only style of having some file and by default having no idea if that's going to run in some program or be a program.
Valve is great in terms of Linux support and it's development, but to be honest I hate Steam launcher too. I do not use the store frontend, friendlist, notifications and other things on top, all I want is to download game binaries and updates.
To be honest I do not like PDF readers being bundled in browser's binaries, I see web rendering engines themselfs as a pile of legacy impossible to rewrite spaghetti.
Qutebrowser for example has PDF.js as an optional, installable dependency. I guess Firefox can be recompiled without PDF support, if someone wants to save those... 3MB. But just that my Linux mind has slight aversion to bundling stuff in single binary, because on Linux installing 1 or 100 programs if they are packaged takes the same time.
Ah. And some commands for PDFs are really useful :P.
For example I used convert file.jpg file.pdf to upload couple of documents I had scanned as pictures but website required a PDF extension.