The Economist print edition, for exxample, routinely uses puns and wordplay in their headlines (though the subtitle is generally more straightforward). But there is a subset of people who firmly believe that headlines should be "just the facts."

Interestingly they are those people that don't read the article. Thus proving the worth of opaque curiosity piquing titles.

Sounds like a boring world to me!

I run ChromeOS, and it is logical in some sense to exclude or at least separate it from Linux classification.

The Linux VM has limited availability. I believe it depends on your processor (I have an i5, some Chromebooks have ARM.) It needs to be enabled as a "developer option" and yes, it is labeled as a developer tool, which means it could break. It will not work if you're logged in with multiple users. (Neither will the Android subsystem.)

ChromeOS will not run graphical Linux applications out of the box. I haven't experimented enough with the VM, but it does not have X11, Gnome, KDE, or Wayland dependencies installed; it is a minimal package list.

The Linux CLI runs in a VM (and a container too, I believe.) So you're running Linux in the sense that WSL runs Linux. ChromeOS Linux has limited access to the rest of the system. You need to configure each shared folder, for example.

That's userland. There aren't any Linux drivers to install, uninstall, or corrupt. You can't look through /proc or do meaningful system monitoring that you would find on Linux. There's no crontab or any scheduled tasks, for that matter.

I'd say it's one notch up from your Android phone in the hierarchy of "what is Linux?"