The [1]SDL2 library is widely used by cross-platform games and other software. Fedora 42 is eyeing the possibility of replacing SDL2 with the sdl2-compat code so that by way of this compatibility layer the newer [2]SDL3 version will ultimately be used instead.

With many games still relying on SDL2 and unlikely to be ported over to SDL3, the proposal raised by Neal Gompa is for sdl2-compat to be used in place of the native SDL2 libraries on next year's Fedora 42 release. In turn this also moves very old SDL 1.2 era games to also using SDL3 via sdl12-compat running on sdl2-compat.

The benefit of getting older SDL 1.2 and SDL2 games/apps running on SDL 3 is for better hardware/software support and a smoother experience and nicer integration with modern Linux distributions. SDL2 hasn't seen feature development in a while now with all resources poured into the much more modern and nicer SDL3.

Currently this SDL2-on-SDL3 plan for Fedora 42 is just at a proposal stage and still needs to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee. Those wishing to learn more can do so via [3]the Fedora Wiki change proposal.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/SDL2

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/SDL3

[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/SDL2onSDL3