Not to keep hitting the same notes, but Raspberry PI does use Vulkan... (https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-version-1-1-conformance-for-raspberry-pi-4/)

If jpct would use the Vulkan renderer I would write a glb importer both for Java and for my C# port. It gives me more pleasure to program for jpct than it does for an engine like Godot (as much as I like Godot). Makes me feel like I'm actually needed. lol

Do you know what? I wrote one anyway. My glb importer only uses the org.json jar. It can read all the built-in textures and set them to the model. Limitations: it will set the normal maps as diffuse and it's not reading any kind of animations. But I'm pretty happy with it. ChatGPT did help a lot, but darn does it take a lot of coaxing to get consistent help from it.

Oh, and here's something I didn't know: lwjgl now has Vulkan bindings: https://www.lwjgl.org/.

Have you ever looked at Vulkan? I'm all for low level coding if needed. I'm still coding some stuff in assembly language. But Vulkan...I can't be bothered, to be honest. You have to do really complicated calls to do basic things and I fail to see why this is supposed to be an advantage...yeah, performance and such. But to be honest, I rather think that the better performance comes from the fact that the old APIs and their supporting drivers got bloated over the years, not because going low level is the only way to go. After all, you are still going to wrap the low level calls of Vulkan in some higher level calls, so why not design them higher level it the first place?
Anyway, that's actually not the point. It's not that there is no support for OpenGL ES on the Raspi, because there is. There's no binding to Java for it. And there's none for Vulkan either, so it wouldn't help anyway...

I'd temporarily store/clone the RotationMatrix of the camera on the moment you enable the freecam. This means you'll have the last known camera rotation matrix which was used when the camera used #lookAt(...). Then instead of doing #lookAt(distantDummy), you do #setRotationMatrix(temporaryMatrix)

Yes, sure...the software renderer will work just as it is on a Pie.