It looks like the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library widely used by cross-platform games for software/hardware abstractions isn't done enhancing its support for running on the X.Org/X11 Server. Similarly, Valve is still committing resources to enhancing the support.

Merged today to SDL3 Git is the introduction of X11TK, an X11 toolkit for the SDL library. Developer Mike Eafton commented when the [1]pull request was opened:

"This PR introduces a "toolkit" for the X11 backend, which allows us to create a non-Zenity file dialogs implementation, a non-Steam overlay keyboard implementation, tray implementation for legacy desktops that dont implement the Ayantana protocols, etc.

This PR also makes message dialogs use the toolkit."

A generic X11 toolkit implementation without having to fallback to GNOME's Zenity or similar for dialog boxes. Additionally, a new generic X11 on-screen keyboard implementation, legacy system tray support, and we'll see what more gets tacked on in the future. Interesting to see this coming about only now in late 2025.

X11TK in its current form comes in at 2.2k lines of new code and 1.1k lines of code removed in reworking the SDL X11 code.



[1] https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/13855