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In Unix and Unix like Operating Systems the standard c library is considered part of the operating system itself, in fact it's mostly a wrapper around the kernel system calls. That means almost every program is linked against the c library and that a different implementation targeting a different kernel won't work. The standard implementation adopted by many Linux distribution is GNU libc (glibc) which is considered slow and bloated by many. There are other implementations targeting the Linux Kernel such as dietlibc, uClibc, musl mainly used in embedded systems. The bottom line is that you can't replace the standard C library just replacing the existing implementation using the package manager or compiling a new one from the source code, you MUST compile every program with it. Anyway there are general purpose distributions (Void Linux is one of them) which offer a different libc implementation (musl in this case) as an alternative to glibc.