We also have an alternative route: unaccelerated X.org as a base, but GTK layered on top of Cairo-OpenVG or Cairo-OpenGLES. This means basic windowing is handled on the CPU (repainting from buffers that Xorg controls) but anything in a pixmap is hardware accelerated. This seems a healthy and speedy compromise.

Obviously Qt can run on OpenVG or OpenGLES too, and we have Unity (and Ubuntu Netbook Remix) to test.

is there any hope of get an open source driver like radeon? i was thinking about buying the new efika, but not likely without an open source driver.

i dont say this to whine, i have an ibook g4 and know that the only way is open source. being at the mercery of a proprietary driver is not a good idea. even while most like nvidia, my first choice is ati for openness.

While I entirely understand your position, I am afraid things are not so clear-cut in the contemporary GPU driver-development landscape (or complete GL software stacks, if we are to be more punctual). That is, open-sourceness is not a guarantee for good GPU support, and closed-sourceness is not necessary an impediment, at least in a finite timeframe. What counts at the end of the day, is that the driver/architecture is actively maintained (in the relevant timeline) by people who know what they're doing, and are well-motivated to get the job done. The ideal scenario would be one where a mature, performant driver codebase is eventually open-sourced and the community has the know-how and vision to drive the codebase further. Unfortunately ideal scenarios have the tendency to not easily occur in practice.

As a final word, allow me to mention that the current GL stack found in the EfikaMX is quite functional, and there are known venues to improve it even further. So you might want to keep an eye on the development ; )