SDL is a set of libraries developed in the C programming language that provide basic functions for performing multimedia operations (audio and video), as well as image loading and management.
After seven months of development announced the release of the new version of SDL 2.28.0 (Simple DirectMedia Layer), which is basically a corrective version, although some changes and new features have been added.
For those who are not familiar with the SDL library, you should know that it, provides tools such as hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics output, input processing, audio playback, 3D output via OpenGL / OpenGL ES and many other related operations.
SDL is analogous to DirectX, to which one could argue that the analogue of DirectX is OpenGL. DirectX also works with input devices and sound. When Loki Software started porting AAA games on Linux, it replaced Direct3D with OpenGL and there was no replacement for everything else and since nowadays it's hard to write applications in "X" even with WinAPI on X11 API, but with DirectDraw on WinAPI which is already a problem, is how SDL was born.
Main new features of SDL 2.28.0
As mentioned at the beginning, this release It is considered as a corrective version and it is practically the last version that adds changes and improvements, since it was announced that the branch SDL 2.x moved to maintenance stage, which involves only bug fixing and problem solving. That is, no new functionality will be added to the SDL 2.x branch anymore, and development will focus on preparing for the SDL 3.0 release.
Of the changes in the SDL 3 branch stand out the processing of some subsystems, API changes that violate compatibility and a large cleanup of deprecated features that have lost their relevance in modern realities.
For example, andn SDL 3 expects full code overhaul to work with sound, use of Wayland and PipeWire by default, the end of support for OpenGL ES 1.0 and DirectFB, the removal of code to work on legacy platforms such as QNX, Pandora, WinRT and OS/2.
Regarding the changes of this new release of SDL 2.28.0, among the innovations found, we can find, for example, this addition of functions SDL_HasWindowSurface() and SDL_DestroyWindowSurface() to switch between the SDL_Rederer and SDL_Surface APIs.
In addition to this, it also highlights the addition of a new SDL_DISPLAYEVENT_MOVED event generated when the main monitor changes or position relative display changes in multi-monitor setups.
Also, we can find the SDL_HINT_ENABLE_SCREEN_KEYBOARD flag to control the display of the on-screen keyboard, as well as general error correction.
Last but not least, it should be mentioned that the work from developers it will also focus on the sdl2-compat compatibility layer, which provides an API that is compatible with SDL 2.x binary and source, but runs on top of SDL 3. for SDL 2 using the capabilities of the SDL 3 branch.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it of this new version, you can check the details in the following link.
How to install Simple DirectMedia Layer on Linux?
Installing this library on Linux is quite simple since most Linux distributions have it within their repositories.
In the case of Debian, Ubuntu and distributions derived from these, you will only have to run the following commands in a terminal:
sudo apt-get install libsdl2-2.0 sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev
While for the case of those who are uArch Linux suarios we just have to run the following:
sudo pacman -S sdl2
In the case of those who are users of Fedora, Centos, RHEL or any distribution based on them, they just have to run the following command:
sudo yum install SDL2 sudo yum install SDL2-devel
For all other Linux distributions, they can search for the package "sdl" or "libsdl" for installation or download and compile the source code.
They do this with:
git clone https://hg.libsdl.org/SDL SDL cd SDL mkdir build cd build ./configure make sudo make install