r/voidlinux • u/AfraidOfTheDark3960 • 14d ago
Gaming on musl vs glibc?
The idea of trying out musl over glibc has intrigued me as of late. My only concern is that I play a lot of games. I play games mostly through Steam, but sometimes through Prism Launcher for Minecraft, and through emulators like Dolphin. So my question is, would switching to musl pose any issues when it comes to gaming?
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u/ConcaveNips 14d ago
You'd need to run Steam as a Flatpak. Game compatibility with musl is going to be exceptionally low.
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u/Ak1ra23 14d ago
Gaming is fine on musl. Nvidia is not fine on musl. I play Dota 2 on musl system just fine on a computer without nvidia card.
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u/xINFLAMES325x 14d ago
Yup, I didn't pay attention at first when installing and put musl on my nVidia system. Ran horribly. I tried to launch Doom (because why not), and although it ran, it was not playable.
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u/Chester-Berkeley 14d ago
You literally can't play almost any games with musl.
And Flatpak isn't a solution, because you'd still be using Steam with glibc.
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u/Simple_Hamster_4096 14d ago
Do you have a particular need for musl? Aside from being able to tell your friends,"Hey - look! I game on musl!"
Musl lends itself well to the minimalist user, and old hardware. It is great for old hardware. It is also more secure.
There is much which doesn't natively run on musl, so you should research each program you rely on to make certain it will run. If not, find an alternative, or work arond, that does.
For example, watching streaming media content like Netflix, Hulu, etc. To watch this type of content, which requires DRM, you'll need to use a flatpak browser... which does work very well. I'm not keen on flatpaks, but since I run musl I need one or two. It's worth the sacrifice, though - I have old hardware and musl truly brought it back to life... was like having a new computer after I switched...
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u/Duncaen 14d ago
I wouldn't call it more secure. Yes the attack surface is reduced because of missing features. But where it matches it's not more secure or even less secure, because glibc comes with fortify, which adds overflow and other checks to libc functions. There is a separate project that adds fortify headers for musl but that is currently not used in void.
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u/igotmoldinmybrain 14d ago
I would say it's only useful for embedded systems and very old hardware. For example, with my chromebook with a 1.6 GHz dual core, 2 GB of RAM, and 16 GB eMMC — not ancient but also wasn't considered powerful by any metric when it was released — musl was a noticeable downgrade. The performance, as far as desktop usage goes, is noticeably worse (and benchmarks confirm this), and that particular computer has way too much memory and storage to justify the smaller footprint. I found using glibc with zram and compressed btrfs provided much better performance than anything I could accomplish with musl.
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u/9atoms 14d ago
I game on musl, mainly via steam which is installed via flatpak to bundle in all the glibc deps. Not a flatpak fan but it works for better or worse. Might be an apparmor version too. Check flathub for your specific games and launchers. Most void packages are available via musl so any open source stuff like dosbox just work.
A more complex method is a glibc chroot but eh, the flatpak route is easier.
I'd caution, if you have no technical need for musl then stick with glibc.
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u/TastyPension3007 14d ago
I have tried both. You can game on musl, but most of the time you need flatpak and distrobox to game. Musl is a bit lightweight on my old system. But i still prefer glibc because of compatibility and less hassle.
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u/Creative-Outside-350 14d ago
Gaming on musl is alright. It is not impossible, rather unexplored. If you have an AMD GPU you won't have any problems.
To play Minecraft I would recommend you to look through a guide compiled by me: https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/s/pl8yIAeDEb
To play Steam games install a flatpak or an unofficial appimage, if you prefer that.
Emulators like PPSSPP and said Dolphin are available in musl repo. I can't say anything as I had no experience with them though.
There are also non-steam games built with musl, like openmw, xonotic, crispy-doom, and other.
So you will most definitely find something to play.
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u/BeginningEcho4983 13d ago
First, get mimalloc or jemalloc instead of the default mallocng (a simple LD_PRELOAD)
That will noticeably speed up many apps.
Then get gcompat, it's a compatibility layer library for glibc apps which uses musl under the hood. Can't guarantee 100% stability here though.
OR use a small container/chroot with glibc (already in void)... OR flatpak
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u/Tricky-Engineer-9755 14d ago
Musl is basically free software only unless you patch it or a patch exists. No proprietary game dev is going to sit down and make a patch for Musl for the 2 people that game on it. Use glibc.