So I started messing around with SDL and while I can't say if it's better or worse than SFML, I can say that it's pretty lower-level as expected. Of course being written in C means that functions require more parameters and you constantly need to convert string objects to c_strings (assuming you are using it with C++), but I knew that going in.

Back in my teenage years, I messed with Pygame a lot. Pygame is basically just a Python wrapper for SDL. I thought this would make learning SDL a breeze, but then I realized that Pygame is a lot more abstract as the creator thought that a simple SDL wrapper would be too much for Python programmers to handle.

I also realized that SDL is very bare-bones out of the box. You need extension libraries if you want to have music, the ability to load images other than bitmaps, or the ability to load TTF fonts. I find this weird because I thought SDL was more than just a graphics library so it should contain all those things.

Either way, I hope that SDL will cause less problems, especially when it comes to linking and porting. Hell, given that it is commonly used, I could probably get away with having my games dynamically linked and just assume that most people already have it installed.