1 point
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It’s an open source linux graphics driver.
It is very widespread, despite being quite slow, because it works. It ships by default with almost everything, and is the fallback when card-specific drivers fail
Edit: what Max_P said
7 points
Mesa is more than just the fallback, it’s literally the entire userland graphics stack for all the open-source drivers. Intel, AMD, it’s also where the Apple Silicon drivers for Asahi lives and more.
It’s not slow at all, unless you end up with the CPU renderer (llvmpipe/lavapipe) due to an unsupported graphics card. That’s usually NVIDIA users because nouveau isn’t great. But even then, when NVK comes out, it’s also in mesa.
