The GPU is being worked on. The Mesa driver is being worked on as we speak by a number of people including rmk and jnettlet, with austriancoder's experimental

The GPU is being worked on. The Mesa driver is being worked on as we speak by a number of people including rmk and jnettlet, with austriancoder's experimental repo located at https://github.com/austriancoder/mesa-1 https://github.com/austriancoder/mesa-1. If you want to get technical, we already have fully open-source 2D acceleration, and we routinely use the 2D GPU to e.g. do colorspace conversion and 2D scaling on video. I went with Debian because we knew some Debian people. At one point I considered moving to Ubuntu, because they package "Firefox" and "Thunderbird" (instead of rebranding them) and they have Chromium as well. There were lots of teething problems, though, ranging from their Xorg modesetting driver refusing to use generic KMS on a non-PCI system, to strange oddities when no initrd was present, to the desktop straight-up crashing when logging in (turns out Unity assumes GL is present and has no fallback.) Ubuntu seems to make many assumptions about running on standard x86 hardware, and was rough around the edges. We could have polished it, but it seemed easier to stick with Debian.