This is excellent. I thought about this years ago for an OpenGL based desktop UI. Apple's UI is using something similar I believe. And the Windows UI too is mostly rendered using Direct3D (which is comparable to OpenGL) since Vista.

I hope someone else uses this for a new Linux distro.

Well, given that so many folks always argue they are Linux distros even though it is an implementation detail for userspace APIs, ChromeOS, WebOS and Android.