[arch-general] latest kernel update surprise

[ITwrx]

On 3/22/20 8:28 AM, Piscium via arch-general wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Mar 2020 at 11:03, Jude DaShiell <jdashiel at 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.

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.