I wonder if this works on older systems. A good use case would be if you are on a managed system and have an uncooperative admin, don't want to bother to ask for them to install new software, or a package is not available for your OS. However this seems to be built against a regular recent kernel?
A couple of years ago at the university I was stuck on an old CentOS / Scientific Linux release, but needed Skype and a newer version of Chrome. So I built glibc + GCC in my home directory, and used patchelf to make the binaries look for libraries in a relative path instead of in /usr/lib. It was annoying to get running but in the end worked like a charm.
I had exactly the same experience in building a glibc and gcc, and it was also on an old CentOS system on HPCs that are not updated and I do not have root privilege to. I used linuxbrew to build glibc and gcc.
In my case it was that VSCode remote delivers a node to remote machine that requires a new glibc, where the HPC does not have. I have to use patchelf to patch the node runtime in order for it to find the glibc libraries I built.
I am so glad there finally more products that allows me to easily run newer software, and glad to see it is Arch Linux, which always have latest software and is my go to for dev machines.
That must have been around 2011, 2012. I don't know which CentOS version it was. It was the current supported version, so not ancient, but not exactly bleeding edge. The problem was that closed source stuff like Chrome didn't work because they only considered Ubuntu and maybe Fedora?
You had to build glibc and GCC in unison, and building them is always difficult, especially the first time. But once I figured out the steps (configure, make, ...) it was easy. The only fiddling was to get all the executables to use "rpath=$ORIGIN" so I could just pop it in my home directory and it would reference the correct variables.
I didn't build Chrome (I'm not that crazy), in fact the above was done so I could avoid building Chrome and just run a Chrom(ium) binary. I think the main reason for this ordeal was to be able to run Flash :-D but I also learned a bit about GCC and so on.
A couple of years ago at the university I was stuck on an old CentOS / Scientific Linux release, but needed Skype and a newer version of Chrome. So I built glibc + GCC in my home directory, and used patchelf to make the binaries look for libraries in a relative path instead of in /usr/lib. It was annoying to get running but in the end worked like a charm.