alt Hacker NewsOn Linux, often times you will be using SDL3 regardless, as sdl2-compat and sdl12-compat are the default implementations of SDL2 and 1.2 on some distros. This has a lot of benefits, from more apps working natively on Wayland (which gives lower latency than XWayland) to better controller support. Not sure what this meant for osu but I wouldn't be surprised if it made the actual switch less impactful for some users.
I was, however, somewhat surprised to learn Ubuntu 24.04 didn't even ship SDL3 to begin with. Turns out SDL3 is newer than I remember. This is likely part of the explanation why SDL3 adoption is lower than expected.
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The compatibility layer mention is valid for many projects, and I personally greatly appreciate that it exists, even if it's a bit buggy
osu! however, is only officially distributed on Linux via AppImage (and semi-officially via Flatpak) and bundles its own SDL for the reasons that, to my knowledge, range from the general pinning to a known stable version approach to the team backporting functionality from SDL3 to SDL2 (last one I remember is non-text-based clipboard functionality, not entirely sure though)
It's been double-stable since early 2025 (version 3.2), so it's weird that Ubuntu doesn't have it when even Debian does. I've seen a couple projects holding back on the upgrade because of that.
With the way the software ecosystem works now, a lot of projects just include a copy or submodule because it's self-contained and a good candidate for it. It dynamically loads most dependencies, so it's pretty light-weight, considering. The whole static linking licensing problem is gone now, too.
Don't most games ship their own build of SDL?