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