While I’m not sure on the whole “viking kittens” thing, I think Wallen does raise an important point. It’s not always about productivity or development tools or command line utilities. Sometimes people just want cool apps that are fun to use and that are focused on a particular need, and that need might have nothing to do with work or anything else related to producing anything.
On the other hand, it might be a bit dangerous to assume that what works for mobile platforms like iOS or Android might also work for desktop Linux. One could make the argument that when somebody sits down at a laptop or desktop they want to do something more than what they’d do on a mobile device.