What have you found bad about bash arrays? I have some simple usage of those (in bash) and they work fine.

It is pretty nice but ultimately it’s just Debian with a slightly different package set and a theme. You can boot the regular live image and set the theme to Adwaita-dark and there’s not really much difference.

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.

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.