Considering it was last updated in the 1990s and only supports 256 colors and fullscreen, and conflicts in very annoying ways with post Vista+ desktop composition, I think its safe to declare it dead for anything except some old games.

SDL is perfectly comparable, except vastly less of a clunky ancient pain in the ass. That is why almost every 2d indie game uses it and not DirectDraw, so to say linux has nothing comparable to DirectDraw is stupid.

SDL is not a platform library with driver support.

Yeah, maybe I should state Direct2D as well to see what your answer would be.

So what is the Linux answer to DirectText? Surely not SDL.

SDL doesn't need driver support, it handles rendering back ends transparently, which is why its so widely used. (drawing is translated into OpenGL, Direct3d, or pretty much anything else)

Freetype and Cairo are the direct equivalent of Direct2d and DirectWrite (which is what i suspect you mean by DirectText) which virtually everything on linux uses.

Yeah the Cairo that bashed by ISO C++ game group as being based on legacy drawing concepts and the FreeType that still doesn't handle properly text display on HD monitors.

Linux had been my primary OS for over two decades and modern Linux is at least as pretty as win10 and I prefer its font rendering (there will be a degree of familiarity favouring that I'm sure).

You keep bringing up these arguments as though they are show stoppers and yet people using Linux as a desktop never mention them.

My mum's been on Linux since 12.04 and has never once said "You know what I need DirectText" users don't care how text gets on the screen only that text gets on the screen.

Edit: should mention she doesn't just use it as a glorified browser container she uses libre office, gimp and a few other programs, organises her music and all the stuff an average user her age would do on windows.

To her it is entirely a functional windows replacement, enough that when I upgrade her machine her request was "can I have that minty thing?"