Edit: Solved for now, going to use Flatpak Steam and Flatpak Lutris to automatically use recent Mesa versions from freedesktop-sdk.

I recently switched from Arch to Debian Stable and so far I’ve been able to get updates for everything I actually need to keep modern from Flatpaks, Homebrew, personal backporting, compiling from source, etc. It’s going well, and I think that stable base + a dozen cutting edge pieces of software is a better strategy for a modern desktop in general than something like Arch, where the entire system is bleeding edge.

The one thing I’m not sure about is getting a recent Mesa version - right now it doesn’t matter much, but the Mesa that shipped with Bookworm was already half a year old on launch, so it might be 2.5 years old by the next release. If I end up wanting a newer Mesa version at some point before the next release, is there a recommended way to do it? I’ve read that backporting Mesa doesn’t work very well, so it’s probably not going to be a backport in the future.

I’ve found this script to build a local Mesa environment and allow arbitrary applications to use it instead of the system version, and it seemed to work well in a VM with some tests. You can specify which Mesa version to build, so I’m planning on building the latest stable Mesa branch if needed (e.g. not an x.x.0 release).

It seems like this is the way to go, but I’m wondering if anyone else has dealt with this problem before, and what the recommended path to solve it is if so. As before, I’m not sure I’ll need a new Mesa in the next 2 years, but if I do I want to have a plan ready that doesn’t push me to move to Sid or a new distro.

  • @suprjami@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    4•11 months ago

    If you’re using Flatpak then you’ll be using their Mesa, which is updated with the runtime. You can also use Mesa-git which is updated much more frequently.

    I am doing this and not worrying about the Debian installed Mesa.

    • Yote.zipOPEnglish
      3•11 months ago

      I’m not always using Flatpaks for gaming, e.g. through Lutris with Blizzard games. I know Steam will use Flatpak Mesa automatically but I’m not sure if Flatpak Lutris would do the same thing, or if it’s possible to use the Mesa Flatpak with arbitrary non-Flatpak commands.

      Edit: Just tested Flatpak Lutris and when spawning a glxinfo terminal it looks like it’s using Mesa 23.1.4 instead of the system version of 22.3.6. It seems like this is the most stable solution.

      I looked through the Mesa Flatpak’s changelog and it seems like they update Mesa sort of aggressively but intentionally skip x.x.0 releases of Mesa, which is the main thing I’m looking for, so this seems good enough for me. I’m not sure if the mesa-git Flatpak is really that useful, since they seem to track pretty tightly against Mesa releases.

      • @suprjami@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4•11 months ago

        iiuc any Flatpak application must use the Flatpak runtime Mesa. If a library doesn’t exist in the Flatpak runtime then the application must package the library itself. No system library is used at all.

        • @Holzkohlen@feddit.de
          2•11 months ago

          Well, I thought it would just kinda “connect” to the system one. I use Nvidia and I have at least two nvidia flatpak packages installed, but I highly doubt those are actual drivers. It just installs the version that matches your system installed one and acts like an interface I’d wager. So it’s different for mesa?