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Have new distro releases become meaningless?
(lemdro.id)
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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Why would that be innovation? libc is stable and ubiquitous. Ironically, Gentoo would probably pull it off but it's not for the distros to do, but rather upstream.
Alpine for example uses musl, and Gentoo offers it as an option.
I don't completely understand the benefits, my own programming experience is several layers away from inner workings of an OS, but at least some distros claim there is space for improvement.
This compares GNU's libc with musl (aims at POSIX conformance and being lightweigth), uClibc (size) and dietlibc (size but has no full support?).
It leaves out Google's bionic, used in Android, which is not compatible with GNU's libc... go figure...
So most alternatives aim to be smaller and some also focus on standards compliance (GNU's libc is not fully POSIX-compliant AFAIK).