Best i can tell, is a &quot;developers developers developers&quot; thing. The goal is to present a set of APIs that abstract away the underlying OS.<p>Sadly though this has been done multiple times over, but then discarded because of CADT.<p>Pop over to Freedesktop.org and you will find the remains of a number of discarded projects. Most of them discarded just as they are 99% feature complete and the devs face the prospect of doing janitorial maintenance.