Android is as much a Linux distro as any other.
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.
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.
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).
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.
>though one weekend of fighting NVIDIA and wayland
Wayland is freedesktop software which is different than GNU.
