The developers of the Void Linux distribution have approved a proposal that has been under consideration since April last year to return to the use of the OpenSSL library. The replacement of LibreSSL with OpenSSL is scheduled for March 5th. It is assumed that the change will not affect the systems of most users, but will significantly simplify the maintenance of the distribution and will solve many problems, for example, it will make it possible to compile OpenVPN with a standard TLS library (currently, due to problems with LibreSSL, the package is compiled with Mbed TLS). The price of returning to OpenSSL will be the cessation of support for some packages that are tied to the old OpenSSL API, support for which was discontinued in new branches of OpenSSL, but was retained in LibreSSL.
Previously, the Gentoo, Alpine and HardenedBSD projects have already returned from LibreSSL to OpenSSL. The main reason for the return of OpenSSL was the growing incompatibility between LibreSSL and OpenSSL, which led to the need to supply additional patches, complicated maintenance and made it difficult to update versions. For example, Qt developers refuse to support LibreSSL, and leave the work of solving compatibility problems to distribution developers, which requires a lot of additional work to port Qt6 when using LibreSSL.
In addition, the pace of OpenSSL development has accelerated in recent years, with extensive work done to improve the security of the code base and add hardware platform-specific optimizations, and provide a full implementation of TLS 1.3. Using OpenSSL will also allow for expanded support for encryption algorithms in some packages; for example, in Python, when compiled with LibreSSL, only a limited set of ciphers was included.
Source: opennet.ru