The Athene Operating System

The Athene Operating System

> integration of the SNAP Graphics technology (in place of XFree86 or X.org)

and

> advantages of SNAP over XFree86 or X.org

are really confusing, IMHO. From these passages one may conclude (I did at first) they're not using X at all, which is wrong - provided mentions of multiple KDE/Gnome/etc apps. XFree86 (or X.org, I don't know) is certainly there, _including_ the X server. It's only the drivers that are theirs, so from the point of view of an end-user, this distribution is in no way different than any other (necessarily commercial) distro shipped with e.g. NVidia drivers included. Technically speaking, the difference is a bit larger, since the SNAP system is not just a collection of alternative drivers, but (from what I can infer from their white paper) a kind of DRI implemented entirely in the user space.