The modern equivalent of SVGALib is Linux' Direct Rendering Infrastructure. If you just want fullscreen app, you can run them on top of DRI. For "a terminal a

The modern equivalent of SVGALib is Linux' Direct Rendering Infrastructure. If you just want fullscreen app, you can run them on top of DRI. For "a terminal and a browser" at the same time you have to create some sort of protocol for windowed display, and an implementation of one side of that protocol that provides window management, and apps would implement the other side. People did that. They named the protocole "Wayland", the window management implementation "Weston", and a number of graphical toolkits can target Wayland (GTK, QT, SDL...). Ref: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_2 https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_2 As a sidenote, if you want to run such a program standalone, fullscreen, can you do that without running a "server" or a "window manager"? IIRC, programs intended for Wayland can run fullscreen on top of plain DRI (or perhaps only SDL provides this facility).