Since the kernel update likely was responsible, and since I have multiple different operating systems on more than one solid state drive and have an arch rescue disk I think what I'll do is to put the disks in and do the updates until after another kernel is installed in those updates then try booting off the arch disk and see what works. The archlinux distro has treated me very well over the years I used it so I'm not inclined to abandon it and the older kernel on the rescue disk will do the screen reading during these updates. On Sun, 22 Mar 2020, Piscium via arch-general wrote:
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2020 09:28:13 From: Piscium via arch-general <arch-general@archlinux.org> To: General Discussion about Arch Linux <arch-general@archlinux.org> Cc: Piscium <groknok@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [arch-general] latest kernel update surprise
On Sun, 22 Mar 2020 at 11:03, Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com> 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 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.
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