FWIW some of the Plasma Mobile apps are available as Android apps, but I my experience most of them are not really stable enough for daily usage.

If you are looking to run the whole Plasma Mobile stack, you could use Termux and proot to run it “natively”, although I imagine it would likely be a huge pain to get anything working reliabilly, if at all.

btop is not Bazzite specific, it’s just preinstalled on Bazzite. You can install it on pretty much any distro.

It’s not just mimicking Linux tho. It’s running an RISC-V emulator via an DLL that is capable of running a (more or less) full-fledged Linux image.

You can express that you are sick of their showcase of their lifestyle just as much as they can showcase them. However, saying that the entire subculture is nothing but shoving their lifestyle at everyone’s face is neither cool nor is it largely the truth. Sure, maybe some of them are annoying, but that’s not the basis to dismiss the entire subculture.

From what I can find it has a quad-core Cortex-A7 ARM32 chip, a.k.a Mediatek MT8321, with 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage, which is not plenty for a device running Android 8.

Your best bet for running “Linux OS” is postmarketOS. But the ARM world is a lot different than the x86 world that you might be familiar with: you can’t just “install” any OS on an ARM platform, you need to port it (write code & tweak config) for each device. And the only device that has the same SoC does not look good.

So you next best choice is probably Termux. It could be installed on any Android devices, and provides a decent “Linux” environment that are pretty close to a real Linux console. Of course, it’s really difficult to run GUI applications, and running things like Docker would probably be out of the questions (ARM32 already had pretty rough Docker support as-is). But still, it’s a good way to get your hands dirty with Linux, and you can definitely use them for quite a few things: writing C or Python code on the go, get familiar with command line, or just run a few small services (e.g. SSH for remote connection, NginX for web server). The possibilities are still endless.

Now, as for the de-googling part, you will still need a custom ROM for this, and I’m not even sure if your device even support flashing third-party ROMs (some carriers would lock it down), so it might not be possible to flash an entire new OS, but someone else seemed to have already posted a potential ROM you could try. Still, you can still find some tutorials that can help you disable as much Google as possible with ADB command, which you might need to adapt to your specific device.