A "fun" little rabbit hole -- conflict is between vtk 9.2 and OpenMEEG 2.5.5. Looks like the former uses HDF5 1.12.2 and the latter only built with 1.12.1... which forces use of VTK 9.1, which has no proper osmesa version (or it's not as easy to use).

If conda-forge/openmeeg-feedstock#40 works I'll merge, then in a couple of hours test locally that things work, then push a commit here. We should see VTK 9.2.2 in all conda-forge builds after this rather than 9.1, which will be nice.

Okay I think we can't just use our built-in file because Qt causes an abort when we try to instantiate it:

mne/viz/utils.py::mne.viz.utils.centers_to_edges PASSED                  [  1%]
qt.qpa.xcb: could not connect to display 
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: eglfs, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, webgl, xcb.

Fatal Python error: Aborted

we could maybe try to detect this but it seems fragile. The same problem will occur if people accidentally try to use mne-qt-browser or matplotlib with the Qt backend, etc.

The simplest solution seems to be to keep the separate server_environment.yml file and keep it up to date with environment.yml, except for removing things that depend on Qt (removing pyvistaqt, mne-qt-browser, etc. from the file; changing mne and matplotlib to their -base variants).

... @hoechenberger for your docker instance, though, another option would be to use environment.yml but make sure you have Xvfb running in the background

Okay I tried adding some infrastructure for detecting bad Qt and notebook setups, hopefully this makes the NB run pass, and we can indeed delete the server_environment.yml. We'll see 🤞

Seems to be working, @drammock feel free to mark for merge if you're happy with this approach

Yay!

@drammock i had automerge activated, please feel free to revert if you're not happy with this PR!