Mesa
Hacker ApprovedRanked 2 of 8 graphics drivers by recommenders
Free, open-source graphics drivers for Linux GPUs that people say match or beat proprietary drivers. Critics point to a heavy build chain and occasional regressions.
Free, open-source graphics drivers for Linux GPUs that people say match or beat proprietary drivers. Critics point to a heavy build chain and occasional regressions.
39 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 30
- criticize it
- 9
- approval share
- 77%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 30 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong open-source Linux GPU drivers
“Vulkan drivers on Linux are in a much better shape because they are centralized under the MESA project”
Comment from 3 Sep 2026 on Hacker News “AMD/Intel Mesa based drivers are fully open source and are built in a much more Linux-native way.”
Comment from 5 Jun 2026 in “WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access” “the open-source user-space drivers, e.g., in Mesa, are actually very good these days”
Comment from 21 Mar 2026 in “Our Commitment to Windows Quality” - Comment from 19 Oct 2026 in “macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL”
- Comment from 30 Dec 2025 in “GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder: What it means for you”
- Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “Arm Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU: desktop-class mobile gameplay with AI-native graphics”
Admired free software with wide impact
“It's amazing what impact one good piece of software, freely available to anyone anywhere to use, can have on a field.”
Comment from 14 Sep 2026 in “'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet” “MESA, a piece of software referenced in this article, is a pretty incredible system.”
Comment from 13 Sep 2026 in “'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet” “it's pretty cool tech that has been developing for a long time”
Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs” - Comment from 11 Nov 2025 in “FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs”
- Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “Steam Frame”
Performance better than proprietary drivers
“they've implemented a driver for Mesa that has equal or better performance on ARM than the proprietary one from Qualcomm”
Comment from 21 Nov 2025 in “Helping Valve to power up Steam devices” “AMD has Mesa drivers for graphics, which are better-optimized than Nvidia's proprietary Linux Vulkan drivers.”
Comment from 22 Jul 2026 in “Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver” “Mesa drivers are unparalleled by Apple or Microsoft, in a myriad of ways.”
Comment from 31 Dec 2025 in “Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux” - Comment from 14 Jul 2026 in “Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK”
Newer versions boost performance
“Installing backported kernels & mesa versions on my aging Debian version got me much better results”
Comment from 8 Nov 2025 in “SQLite concurrency and why you should care about it” “a custom MESA build (with -O2 and -march set to your CPU) would give a good boost”
Comment from 11 Jan 2026 in “Gentoo Linux 2025 Review” “Mesa, the kernel drivers and Proton have all seen a lot of growth this past year”
Comment from 2 Jan 2026 in “Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC, put Linux on it”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Heavy dependency chain to build
“Getting all of LLVM mesa linux cmake ninja glibc gcc binutils xorg KDE to work is more work than in 2005 or 2010.”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Linux from Scratch” “Xorg requires MESA which requires... drumroll please... clang and llvm”
Comment from 3 Aug 2026 in “Invelinux – An independent, RAM-based Linux distribution using Toybox and musl” “cmake, meson/ninja, mesa, llvm and so forth”
Comment from 5 Apr 2026 in “Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11” Regressions and bugs in releases
“The fact that no agreeable solution was figured out in about a decade, and then Nvidia has to code up that solution for the Mesa project is a failure on Mesa's end.”
Comment from 4 Jan 2026 in “Can I start using Wayland in 2026?” “the latest releases caused some problems with auto detection mechanism in Mesa”
Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “Isn't WSL2 just a VM?” “had to tumble down mesa/virtio-gpu/gallium recently, an epic mess.”
Comment from 30 Jun 2026 in “Investigating Linux Graphics (2025)”
Other graphics drivers people recommend
The four most recommended other graphics drivers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA proprietary Linux drivers | 40 | 49 | 45% | 10 | 20 yrs9 owners | — |
| MesaThis page | 30 | 9 | 77% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Nvidia drivers | 25 | 53 | 32% | 9 | 14 yrs4 owners | — |
| amdgpu driver | 15 | 11 | 58% | 6 | — | — |
| ntsync | 11 | 3 | 79% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 45 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“on Linux both the GL and Vulkan drivers are in good shape via the MESA project”
“Mesa replaced MetroX and was fast enough to do routine modelling for smaller systems”
“On Linux at least you can use Mesa to fix it up.”
“AMD supports Mesa precisely so that enthusiasts can do this.”
“It's amazing what impact one good piece of software, freely available to anyone anywhere to use, can have on a field.”
“MESA, a piece of software referenced in this article, is a pretty incredible system.”
“Amdgpu and mesa is working out fairly well for amd”
“Vulkan drivers on Linux are in a much better shape because they are centralized under the MESA project”
“Like their proton, maybe kernel or mesa”
“Wish I could say the same for software like mesa, I'd need help for this one”
“just pinged the Mesa team about driver bugs with a rough draft of a patch and gotten it fixed”
“Xorg requires MESA which requires... drumroll please... clang and llvm”
“start by reading Mesa open source driver code”
“AMD has Mesa drivers for graphics, which are better-optimized than Nvidia's proprietary Linux Vulkan drivers.”
“the trail goes cold in a mysterious 2012 commit about Mesa, it's literally a performance to bring the plane cargo back”
“AMD's Mesa drivers are better”
“had to tumble down mesa/virtio-gpu/gallium recently, an epic mess.”
“AMD/Intel Mesa based drivers are fully open source and are built in a much more Linux-native way.”
“cmake, meson/ninja, mesa, llvm and so forth”
“the open-source user-space drivers, e.g., in Mesa, are actually very good these days”
“Huzzah for libgl1-mesa-dri.”
“can definitely see this being useful for actually doing some remote collaborative work”
“Writing rules forces teams to articulate what their standards are.”
“Mesa is yet another exercise in passing the responsibility to a magical system.”
“why would you adopt a proprietary hosted VCS (and a startup to boot which could disappear anyway)?”
“Agents.jl and Mesa have the selling point of having better languages / libraries for numerical computation”
“Getting all of LLVM mesa linux cmake ninja glibc gcc binutils xorg KDE to work is more work than in 2005 or 2010.”
“MESA drivers are a godsend in Claude Code for web if working on non-web GUIs”
“a custom MESA build (with -O2 and -march set to your CPU) would give a good boost”
“The fact that no agreeable solution was figured out in about a decade, and then Nvidia has to code up that solution for the Mesa project is a failure on Mesa's end.”
“Mesa, the kernel drivers and Proton have all seen a lot of growth this past year”
“Mesa drivers are unparalleled by Apple or Microsoft, in a myriad of ways.”
“Intel/AMD hardware works out of the box with Mesa.”
“the latest releases caused some problems with auto detection mechanism in Mesa”
“they've implemented a driver for Mesa that has equal or better performance on ARM than the proprietary one from Qualcomm”
“improvements in the graphics stack (Mesa, amdgpu drivers)”
“Valve is using Mesa instead.”
“it's pretty cool tech that has been developing for a long time”
“it's paying off in dividends both for Linux and for Valve”
“Installing backported kernels & mesa versions on my aging Debian version got me much better results”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.