alt Hacker NewsThis is exactly right - you can get a framebuffer on just about anything, including pretty much any video card made since about 1990, and also more fun things like the little i2c display that your toaster has. No need to restrict relatively simple software like fbi/fim to running on less hardware by using drm.
I used to play videos with the framebuffer just fine and read PDF's with fbpdf2, among watching TV with fbtv and the like. I didn't miss nearly anything, as most games under SDL1/2 can render into FB with
or And tons of games too, such as Supertux2, Crispy Doom, SDLQuake, FreeCiv-SDL...