SDL3 was always-attempted at boot with crash-recovery fallback. The dlopen + Mesa DRI loader + SDL_Init + window/renderer creation costs real time on every cold boot and offers no measurable visual benefit on the hardware we ship — DRM dumb buffers do the same thing faster and don't pull a GLES context full of failure modes (the partial-init state when SDL starts but Mesa's renderer doesn't was almost certainly the source of the "garbled chars on boot" the user reported). Now opt-in via AC_USE_SDL=1. Default = straight to DRM. The whole SDL3 loader code path is preserved (sdl_init/sdl_load/crash handler) for when we want it back; it just doesn't run. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>