On many Android devices, especially Pixels, devices being 'locked' is not the problem at all. It is that historically Android was built to fundamentally differe

On many Android devices, especially Pixels, devices being 'locked' is not the problem at all. It is that historically Android was built to fundamentally different from mainstream Linux, and it is hard to make mainstream Linux work with your phone's hardware [1]. And the phone hardware providers are notoriously terrible about supporting anything. Since virtualization abstracts those historic incompatibilities and driver issues away, there's a lot more stability you can expect from there. That is in addition to some other legitimate changes Google is making to make Pixel phones somewhat closer to mainstream Linux. [1]: PostmarketOS shows that it's very possible to do so on plenty of devices, but just not without a lot of tradeoffs: https://postmarketos.org https://postmarketos.org