Or are you saying more conventional Linux is superior? Gnu/Linux is a good term for that.
What GNU software is actually being removed from any distro?
GrapheneOS-style sand-boxing for every app is long overdue in Linux. I'd love to have it's granular permissions for every single service. I'd love to have the battery management, the unified settings UI, the effortless disk encryption UX and key management.
Could you build it with SE Linux and a lot of glue? Yes, but nobody has. And doing it well, everywhere, would take a lot of hours.
You will never have a UI capable of encompassing all the settings available in Linux. You will only have a UI capable of configuring your desktop experience, which is just a small subset of the full Linux experience.
It's all in one place - I can't think of a single thing I would want to configure that isn't found in that one dialog. It doesn't always make sense, but it's searchable, and the search works.
make menuconfigAndroid is very good at exposing things like
* "which service may know the device location?"
* "which app accessed the microphone 2 minutes ago?"
* "which apps burn the most battery?"
All of those make sense on ChormeBooks, and all of those are difficult with Linux.
Unfortunately, not even close to being as comfortable to use as GrapheneOS, and still significantly less secure than it - even if we completely disregard the sad situation of hardware security on x86 (but can't blame QubesOS for that one).
Game devs working in Linux is always a lagging indicator. Once there's a market share, they'll go there. Once it's the preferred os for people, you'll be able to develop on it. Games is already an incredibly risky market sector.
Instead, I encourage you to look at blender. It's gone through a "cute hobbyist/prosumer tool" phase and is now in the mega million dollar movies and games use it as their primary tool. Desktop Linux is on a similar curve thanks to Valve. If enough people start using it at home, industry will flip over.
Blender was a commercial product that became FOSS, with an existing customer base.
You've developed a "No true Scotsman" definition for desktop Linux that seems far from the common understanding that "if you use Linux as your OS on your desktop, you are a desktop Linux user".
If you feel your definition of purity tested "only Linux binaries or it doesn't count as a Linux desktop" is better, I'm not going to tell you you are wrong, just expect that you have a definition significantly out of the norm and will have a challenging uphill battle in getting others to adopt it.
It would be great, however it died alongside netbooks.
I can imagine also because Asus' distro was pretty terrible, it probably gave some backlash against Linux. I think the only reason they made it was to make it work on that tiny screen.
I spent ages at the time trying to make macOS work. I had it booting but due to the CPU being below 1 Ghz the timing screwed up and timing related actions happened in slow motion (this was a timing divider issue not sure to the slowness itself). I even messed with the kernel code trying to get it to work.
On a later Acer netbook I got it running perfectly though.
It was rather limited though, in the amount of applications running simultaneously, around four if not mistaken, without going into press archeology.