On Sunday, March 22, 2020 2:28:13 PM CET Piscium via arch-general wrote:

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.

I kind of disagree, I think that the KISS, no-magic approach of arch is perfect for visually impaired or blind power users like Jude. However, maybe you should consider using the LTS kernel, packages as linux- lts? I have it installed and boot into it every ~4 years when something critical like wifi breaks. The LTS kernel has never broken for me, you might have a better experience with that. Cheers, Bennett

<https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/linux-versioned-bin/> On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 1:20 PM Ralf Mardorf via arch-general < arch-general@archlinux.org> wrote:

On Sun, 22 Mar 2020 14:43:44 +0100, Bennett Piater wrote:

...

However, maybe you should consider using the LTS kernel, packages as linux- lts?

It doesn't harm to install more than just one kernel and one of those kernels IMO should be a LTS kernel.

For those who are particularly concerned about breakage due to kernel upgrades, they might be interested in my AUR packages for versioned kernel installs: https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/linux-versioned-bin/ https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/linux-lts-versioned-bin/ These repackage the Arch kernels so that multiple versions can be installed simultaneously, so that after an upgrade the previous version is still available. Usually having the regular and LTS kernels is sufficient to ensure at least one boots or doesn't have some regression that's appeared in the other, but if you need more than that, versioned kernel installs might be useful. -Chris

Problem solved, kernel was not responsible for speaker-test and espeakup failures. As near as I can figure it, my /etc/asound.conf file got corrupted somehow and that was enough to temporarily break the system. After having used the rescue disk and having selected my preferred speaker set and having copied the generated asound.conf file into the arch-chroot mounted system speaker-test and the screen reader now works. This time it's fenrir being used since it's time I did the learning curve on that screen reader anyway. --

On Sun, 22 Mar 2020 at 14:03, <leoutation@gmx.fr> wrote:

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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.

Hi Did you installed Arch in the right way? The only Arch installation method is here. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide

Yes, that is what I used.

Since 22 years, i use Linux. After redhat, suse, gentoo, fedora, debian stable,testing and sid, i went to Arch. I get rare problems with Arch, less than with other distributions (except with venerable debian/stable)

Like I said above, " 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." I will say the obvious that different people have a different experience of Arch (and other distros) as it depends on what they use it for and what packages they have installed, as well as on the hardware. When I moved from Fedora to Arch I continued using the same packages and had more issues in Arch, not with Arch but with third party packages. I never had an issue with Arch software like pacman, etc. :-) In other words, I totally believe you when you say you have less problems in Arch but that does not disprove that I have more in Arch, it is just that you use a different set of packages on different hardware! That said Arch is far more reliable than Ubuntu non-lts! Some examples: yesterday I had to kill Firefox because it got stuck with one core at 100%. In Arch problems with FF come and go. In Fedora I also sometimes had problems with FF but far less than in Arch. Another example, Conky. There was an upstream bug when displaying used RAM, which was fixed in upstream git but months passed and upstream would not release a new version. So after months of wait I got pissed off with this RAM display issue and installed the AUR version of conky. In Fedora in a similar situation typically the Fedora packager would create a new version of the package with the patch. I don't know if that happened in the specific case of conky, I have not checked, I am just talking about what typically happened. Arch has the policy of not patching upstream code unless needed to fit the Arch way of doing things. That is one of the reasons why I said that Fedora is more stable than Arch. That said, Fedora 13 for me was an horror story, I had lots of kernel crashes!

To become happy Arch user: First, very important: use linux-lts all and "lts" or "still" packages you can find. Non lts kernels *are not* stable. Then, don't update each day. Then, when you do something, you have to know what you are doing.

Yes, a while back I was having lots of problems with the standard kernel and then I started using the lts kernel, but sometimes the lts does not work and I switch to the standard one! But mostly for the past year and half I have used the lts kernel. I use the still version of Libreoffice, which is perfectly fine for me as I don't need the latest features.

On Sun, 22 Mar 2020 at 14:59, Eli Schwartz via arch-general <arch-general@archlinux.org> wrote:

Note that backporting an upstream fix is not considered "patching upstream code".

Yes, that is more precise. Fedora packagers would do both, backporting and patching according to what they thought it was needed.

In that case, it will just depend on how problematic the issue is and whether it justifies the effort of a backport.

A good example below, thanks! https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=zfs-dkms&id=d364766c9b790b02ca72e38146a7d7ee21ca05ae

On 3/22/20 8:28 AM, Piscium via arch-general wrote:

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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.

hello. blind TalkingArch maintainer here. i think Jude's problem not related to the kernel or espeakup. if speaker-test doesn't work. that means either alsa or another sound system doesn't work. since I use the latest versions of packages and do not have such a problem, I can’t tell you more specifically. but perhaps you should see the logs. Sincerely, Alexander.

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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