Clojurians Log v2

Not a Clojure question per se, but I’m trying to get my development environment set up on Linux (specifically BunsenLabs, a derivative of Debian Jessie) and am having a hard time getting a modern Emacs (26 or 27) installed (Debian only provides 24). I use linuxbrew, which has 26, but installs --without-x and I want X. I manually edited the formula to remove that flag, but keep getting told configure: error: You seem to be running X, but no X development libraries were found, but I have libx11-dev and a ton of related packages installed through Aptitude. I’d prefer to stay with something that easily updates (Linuxbrew, a third-party PPA, etc.) instead of building from source, but at this point just want a proper Emacs—any suggestions?

Have you considered nix? Nixpkgs unstable provides prebuilt Emacs 27.1. I tried it out on my Ubuntu, and a nix-env -iA nixpkgs.emacs got me a working install in a minute or so.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelleyk/emacs gets you access to at least Emacs 26 on Ubuntu... I'm not familiar enough with Debian vs Ubuntu etc to know whether that's a useful response (but since Teodor mentioned Ubuntu).

Kelley's PPA turns up in lots of places as the way to get more modern versions of Emacs on those versions of Linux.