FreeGLUT or Mesa, which one should I use?

Question

So as the title says, which one would you choose? It would be great if one can also explain the reasons behind.

Answer 1

FreeGLUT is a simplicistic framework for the creation of small OpenGL demos. Alternatives to FreeGLUT would be SDL, GLFW, or full blown frameworks like Qt.

Mesa is a open source implementation of the OpenGL API, and together with the DRI/DRM project drivers forms a full HW accelerated OpenGL implementation. If you're using Linux and use your GPU with open source drivers, Mesa is the OpenGL implementation you use. That's not a choice, that's a fact.

They're completely different things and neither can replace the other.