[mananaysiempre]

Part of it is the Glibc loader’s carnal knowledge of Glibc proper; there’s essentially no module boundary there. (That’s not completely unjustified, but Glibc is especially hostile there, like in its many other architectural choices.) Musl outright merges the two into a single binary. So if you want to do a loader then you’re also doing a libc.

Part of it for desktop Linux specifically is that a lot of the graphics stack is very unfriendly to alternative libcs or loaders. For example, Wayland is nominally a protocol admitting multiple implementations, but if you want to not be dumb[1] and do GPU-accelerated graphics, then the ABI ties you to libwayland.so specifically (event-loop opinions and all) in order to load vendor-specific userspace drivers, which entails your distro’s preferred libc (probably Glibc).

[1] There can of course be good engineering reasons to be dumb.

[codedokode]

Why do you need "vendor-specific userspace drivers"? I thought graphic acceleration uses OpenGL/Vulkan, and non-accelerated graphics uses DRM? And there are no "drivers" for Wayland compositors?

[matheusmoreira]

OpenGL and Vulkan are implemented as libraries in user space as the Mesa project.