[arch-general] Does LTS package really not fit to Rolling Release model and Arch Philosophy?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 19 Nov 2016 03:27:43 +0900, Ken OKABE via arch-general wrote:
>>What's completely missing by the kernel related explanation is, that  
>>upstrem provides, IOW maintains longterm linux,
>>https://www.kernel.org/ . Does KDE upstream maintain KDE Plasma LTS?
>
>Ralf, exactly, and that is to what I'm attracted.

What happens if a shared library required by Plasma, is not part of the
Plasma project? You either need to maintain the outdated lib or build
against the new lib, which could cause issues for Plasma. I doubt it
will work for a rolling release. Again, if it should work, a third
party repository needs to provide it, since Arch is a real rolling
release.

On Fri, 18 Nov 2016 20:19:10 +0100, Bennett Piater wrote:
>If it's still not stable enough for you, you might want to consider
>switching to something lighter, like XFCE or even a simple window
>manager (WM).

Xfce4 changed it's behaviour within a major release, just by upgrading
to another dot release, apart from this Thunar is broken since a very
long time, let alone that Xfce4 for sure doesn't provide what a bloated
DE, such as KDE does provide and OTOH Xfce4 doesn't provide really more
than a simple window manager provides.

There is no way to provide a consistent and stable behaviour for a
desktop environment within a rolling release.

I dropped all desktop environments and after a while using jwm, I ended
with using openbox.

Unfortunately GTK3 and Qt5 are a PITA, qt5ct doesn't work for all
apps and GTK3 has broken some apps completely. But even many GTK apps
that aren't broken tend to ignore font configurations or depending on
the used theme, font rendering differs among GTK apps. It's not better
when using release model distros. In short, you carefully need to
select apps.

On Sat, 19 Nov 2016 08:31:22 +0900, Ken OKABE via arch-general wrote:
>3-a Plasma might fail to launch
>3-b Plasma-LTS might fail to launch

It's not the same as a kernel that doesn't work. The kernel is the
direct interface to the hardware and provides basic functionality
without an endless amount of interacting dependencies.

It's easy to provide linux-lts. If the kernel should fail, you even
can't repair the install. If Plasma fails, you could repair it from
command line or by launching a window manager.

Regards,
Ralf