[arch-general] latest kernel update surprise

[Piscium]

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

> 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.