I haven't looked at Vulkan either (haven't done OpenGL stuff either recently), so I took a gander.
I'm running on a Debian-derivative, a mix of Ubuntu and Mate. I happened to have the main libraries (libvulkan1) already installed, so after installing mesa-vulkan-drivers (I'm running Intel HD 620 built-in graphics) and vulkan-utils, both
vulkaninfo and
vulkan-smoketest worked fine; I do get obviously accelerated 3D.
The development package, libvulkan-dev, has both C and C++ headers, and even provides pkg-config files, so using
`pkg-config --cflags vulkan` and
`pkg-config --libs vulkan` in Makefiles suffices to add the necessary compile and link time flags. Good. The Khronos Group
Vulkan-Samples github seems a good place to start development exploration; it contains links to further resources, too.
My first impression is that it is definitely verbose, even for me. That's not a negative, though, because cross-platform compatibility often requires such verbosity; just an observation. Some may find it irritating, but it looks like a lot of it can be abstracted away (identical code for similar use cases), so I guess I don't mind. I do like the portability aspects of it a lot, even if it means one has to write more boilerplate code.
To be any more specific, I'd need to have a practical test case at hand to explore/solve/develop for, to construct an opinion.