On 3/22/20 8:28 AM, Piscium via arch-general wrote:
5.59-10 on the machine I use. I'm using a different version of linux on another disk to write this message. Strangely, both speaker-test and espeakup no longer work. The speaker-test failure would of course cover espeakup since espeakup uses sound card resources to do screen reading. Was anything done to the kernel to cause these failures? Before Arch I used Fedora for 7 years. I found Fedora far more stable
On Sun, 22 Mar 2020 at 11:03, Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com> wrote: than Arch when upgrading to a new Fedora version 3 months after release when most bugs have been fixed. With Arch there is always something that does not work properly and then days or weeks later it starts working again. It is not Arch's fault, rather it results from its KISS principle of making minimal or no changes to upstream packages so you get all the issues from upstream. Fedora does lots of patching and updates things less often so it is more stable than Arch.
My suggestion is that if you are looking for reliability to use Debian Stable which has a big choice of packages and it stable, or else Fedora which is in between Debian Stable and Arch with respect to up-to-date packages and stability. Arch might not be the best distro for you. My €0.02.
i find Arch to be pretty stable, with one caveat: you have to use upstream software that will keep up with the rest of the ecosystem to a reasonable degree. I try not to use ancient software and only usually have problems with maintained software where the upstream devs choose the oldest lts distro they can find as their gnu+linux dev/support target. I looked at the programs espeakup is connected with, and espeak is from 2014, and the speakup download page was last modified in 2015. I suspect something finally quit working with modern gnu+linux, and not so much Arch, in particular. All that being said, if you need really old software, you may need a really old distro to run it on.