Unless you use musl-gcc which is a proper GCC frontend with musl libc sysroot. The compiler is indeed (too) tightly coupled to its sysroot but linux is not spec

Unless you use musl-gcc which is a proper GCC frontend with musl libc sysroot. The compiler is indeed (too) tightly coupled to its sysroot but linux is not special here. If anything interacts with the CRT it needs to know which CRT to use. I'm not arguing that there aren't problems here, just that I think people have different expectations that are a little extreme. The libc implementation is a core part of the operating system, if you want to target that OS you should target that libc. Some distros (alpine) prefer musl libc, most prefer glibc. And distros really are different operating systems.