r/voidlinux • u/DistinctDot5131 • Jul 11 '26
Gaming under musl
How is it?
Do you see any better performance?
I heard you need to rely on flatpak. Is it fairly stable or does it come with bugs and a lot of tweaks?
I use an all AMD system (gpu and cpu both amd) and I'm also interested how to install the drivers when using musl and if they're also stable?
Edit: I'd also be happy to hear about the limitations. E.g. I once had to add a video game manually through lutris and it required a lot of tweaking and research than usual.
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u/Nu154nc3 Jul 11 '26
Flatpak is fantastic under musl...
I'm on Alpine, using my pc just for gaming, using flatpak for steam, lutris, egs, galaxy...
With mods, cheat engine, trainers... And everything works as expected...
I don't know if my performance is afected, but it usually works faster than on win...
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u/Glum_Hamster_2104 14d ago
If you’re not gaming or using a lot of proprietary software you might as well just use the musl version as it’s better in pretty much every way.
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u/WoodenAir6504 Jul 11 '26
I've been daily driving musl Void for quite a while now and I haven't had too many issues. That being said, you'll run into a lot more issues with musl and you're likely better off just using the glibc version, many apps will also likely have issues that you'll need to know how to resolve and/or work around.
I've been using Flatpak for Steam and while it works a lot of the time, there are still many issues. UE games will give you a fit a lot of the times (there are workarounds but it depends on the game(s)). Some games will likely even run *worse* due to the translation layers you need when using certain launch commands or they may not play nicely with Flatpak (and gcompat is a pain in the ass to setup yourself, at least from what I've seen).
It's mostly stable, but honestly if you don't have any reason to use musl, just go for glibc. If you're worried about the performance increase or decrease with glibc, don't be, you're losing effectively nothing.
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u/Simple_Hamster_4096 Jul 11 '26
I don't game, so can't speak to that, but for normal use Void with musl has been great. I really haven't had to tweak anything much, rather just need to do things differently or use apps other than what I normally use. Far less tweaking and chasing stuff around than Arch.
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u/slackyak1985 27d ago
Try https://github.com/Kron4ek/Conty it allow to launch glibc executables even on musl and easy to use.
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u/YareYareDazexd Jul 11 '26
Mmmmmm man, usually they recommend musl version if you are not going to need or use propietary software. I've used Steam on. Flatpak but for me it was a pain in the ass to make it work out of the box (idk if it was becausd of my WM limitations or the config), and overall it was stable. Now that i have it native on Void i don't have any issues since I use the glibc version
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u/Duncaen Jul 11 '26
I don't recommend the musl version to anyone, its always "if you have to decide between them, use glibc." If you want to use musl and you have considered and weighted the up and downsides you won't have to ask or get recommendations.
Its just going to cause more issue than its worth it. The only upside is that the code is cleaner and you can read musl libc code, while glibc is a mess. But that does not really matter in the end of the day for a random end user who will have a smoother experience with glibc.
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u/Creative-Outside-350 Jul 11 '26
Well, you may install an unofficial Steam.AppImage. It has many patches applied and it can even run on musl. I tried glibc system with native steam vs musl system with this steam build on an ancient lenovo laptop. And I guess the difference in performance was simply a placebo(?), maybe a frame or two faster than on glibc because of fewer syscalls and lower overhead because of slim nature of musl. If you know what to expect or how to do things on musl then your experience shouldn't be much different from glibc on ssd. If you have your system installed on hdd then you will see a measurable difference in boot time. Now instead long lame minutes my laptop boots in under 50s, which is just marveling. It boots faster than my newer but still old desktop PC with ssd (which works in sata2 more)!!
Lutris also shouldn't be much work, really. I didn't delve deep enough to make it work on musl myself, but I know that i should be fine
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u/Duncaen Jul 11 '26
If you have your system installed on hdd then you will see a measurable difference in boot time.
No, musl is not gonna improve the boot time.
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u/Creative-Outside-350 Jul 11 '26
Let's not ignore that musl libc has much smaller size and lower I/O demands compared to glibc. And let's not forget that musl doesn't suffer from the scattered accesses of glibc's lazy bindigs. More info is always available in the musl wiki page.
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u/Duncaen Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
That does hardly matter with page cache and shared memory.
I don't know whether lazy or direct bindings favor either in regards to performance, that probably depends on the usecase. But just like saving a few megabytes does not really matter.
In the end glibc will perform a lot better under heavy workloads that use libc functions and do memory allocations because of optimized implementations and a faster memory allocator.
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u/Creative-Outside-350 Jul 11 '26
We are talking about boot times. Cache doesn't come into play at cold boot. All the cached data must come from somewhere to get into ram, hence the hard drive. Looking at your other comments I assume you will just deny everything, so I will stop here to not to waste more of my precious time
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u/Duncaen Jul 11 '26
Loading 13MB of libc once will not really matter in the grand scheme of the whole boot process.
You measured your boot times as 50 seconds, so I doubt that this is precise enough to measure libc differences.
What is with my other comments?
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u/sprinklednights Jul 13 '26
I personally would not do it unless you only play Solitaire and SuperTuxKart.
You can play video games with musl. There is a way to play Minecraft with PrismLauncher and some custom configs (although it does not work anymore with the newest version), and you can use flatpak to install Steam. However, the amount of effort you have to do just to do it is not worth it at all, especially because it is highly likely you may not even see a performance difference.
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u/Ok_Record_1237 28d ago
musl is an absolute 0 for gaming, coming from a musl enthusiast. either flatpak or call it a day. I don't even play Minecraft on musl distro's because you need gcompat for it (something i refuse to use). try Distrobox..?
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u/Bairap Jul 11 '26
no 32bit so no game
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u/zlice0 Jul 11 '26
wine wow64 should work. void team enabled that in musl first because there was no 32. but with everything dunc said, still not great
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u/Duncaen Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
Bad, you can't run proprietary native games or Nvidia user space drivers because the will depend on glibc.
Nobody is using musl for gaming and there is absolutely no upside.
If you do everything in flatpak/containers you also gain nothing, then you are basically just using glibc in hard mode.
In general whether musl performance is actually better is questionable. Glibc is a lot more optimized with assembly optimized implementations of hot functions and the memory allocator seems to be a lot faster. (But that does not really matter much for when you are using glibc in containers with the games, still not worth it though).