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by JdeBP 33 days ago
The annoying thing, looking at that, is that libnsfb (the library that netsurf-fb uses to construct its UI) once had a driver, deleted back in 2018, that could work directly with a Linux framebuffer device. This could have been easily adapted into a similar driver for wscons/wsdisplay/wskbd on OpenBSD and NetBSD.

* https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/commit/b2bb565402...

Instead, libnsfb is now layered on top of SDL in the non-X11 non-Wayland case, with all of the dependencies and extra stuff that that entails, which of course you'll have to build. SDL3 explicitly doesn't handle dumb framebuffers and full wscons, explicitly requiring foreign KMS systems from Linux on the BSDs.

* https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README-kmsbsd

libnsfb then proceeds to ignore almost all of SDL anyway and draw its own UI directly, with SDL being little more than a glorified framebuffer-as-bitmap system with a couple of basic blitting operations.

* https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/blob/master/src/s...