Trolling does not help much the discussion. Android runs on Linux, there's just no way to argue about that. But in the end we are in agreement about some points at least: no enough apps right now, but it's definitely progressing, albeit slowly, just as Linus said... Which was sort of my point. Oh well.

Android won consumers, so there's hope for Linux for consumers. I seems that people care about apps, and what's on Windows that you can't get on Linux these days? Definitely not everything. But the list is growing. Video editors (e.g DaVinci) games(steam), it's all slowly coming together, so Linus definitely has a point I'd say.

Facing a similar problem, I ended up choosing a Lenovo Thinkpad T440s (fully loaded), which gives me lots of battery life, a 3G modem to connect from everywhere (supported out-of-the-box by Ubuntu), and a set of high-end desktops and servers to do the heavy lifting. I get best of both worlds: I can develop and test things on my (still pretty fast) laptop, and once I have basic tests passing I push my code and remote-run jobs on more powerful servers that I don't really need to carry around with me.

I noticed the same benefits using Xubuntu 14.04. A lightweight user interface, very fast and easy to use. The OS is also very fast to install, very fast to boot, everything just works and updating is smooth. It may not be as "fancy" as regular Ubuntu or Mint, but I find Xubuntu very stable and polished (our usage is file and compute servers/clusters, desktops, mostly software development and office work).

http://razor-qt.org/

"They" know which SIM connects to which cell tower, so I don't understand how this phone prevents tracking. Did I miss something?