The Mesa driver is all in user space, it's simply a library. You can develop it without messing with your system or any of the applications that are generally o

The Mesa driver is all in user space, it's simply a library. You can develop it without messing with your system or any of the applications that are generally open. Developers can just build and install them to some user-controlled directory (e.g., $HOME/opt) and run from there with LD_LIBRARY_PATH and other similar variables. You can wrap all the variables in a script and run your custom-built mesa with simply "$ with-custom-mesa glxgears" and then glxgears will be using your custom (and possibly broken) driver, while everything else will still be using the default drivers from the distro. You could use containers such as systemd-nspawn, but it's much more complicated than simply using $HOME/opt. Edit: https://docs.mesa3d.org/install.html#running-against-a-local-build https://docs.mesa3d.org/install.html#running-against-a-local...