For the purposes of gamedev; Windows, consoles and possibly Mac are the only platforms are the only platforms that absolutely matter. If it runs on Linux, that'

For the purposes of gamedev; Windows, consoles and possibly Mac are the only platforms are the only platforms that absolutely matter. If it runs on Linux, that's nice, but if it doesn't run on some common buggy setup you aren't going to see a response beyond "fix your machine". For Windows users you would see crazy workarounds (i.e API hooking) being broken out real fast. Nothing beyond a simple 2D indie game would consider Linux support more than a non-critical "bonus" feature. You'll also find that people who work on high-performance games (i.e complex 3D) are pretty allergic to using existing libraries, and while it would make sense to use SDL in an example project like this, it's not unreasonable for someone to default to the "proper" way. Beyond things like the basic GL loader, linear algebra and font loading / text rendering libraries, anything that's available is almost guaranteed to be woefully insufficient, more effort than it's worth or loses you too much control. Not to mention you'll inevitably wind up with your own library that provides an equivalent of half the C++ std (even if most of it is implemented using the normal std), which often makes using anything that depends on the usual C++ std pretty painful. For the above reasons, things like SDL or even libev/Boost.ASIO would only be considered suitable for toys. I can't say I'm too happy about having to re-implement things that have already been written a thousand times over already though.