I'd agree that SurfaceFlinger is pretty minimal as a compositor. However, because of the power / performance limitations on mobile devices. you're losing if you

I'd agree that SurfaceFlinger is pretty minimal as a compositor. However, because of the power / performance limitations on mobile devices. you're losing if you're compositing with the GPU rather than say overlays, which SurfaceFlinger does facilitate with the HW Composer (as I'm sure you know). I wouldn't recommend this approach for the desktop but the reason I like this approach for mobile ubuntu initially is that you will get a more mature GPU integration with SurfaceFlinger/ANativeWindow than generic Linux. Edit: we also know the limitation of glesv1 is because of the problems for glesv2 support in some is emulator environments. So it s a trade off. Agree that the multiple display support is a big problem too