tl;dr Title
It’s common knowledge at this point that Arch has a reputation for being very difficult to use which led to it becoming a meme ( like everything else on the internet). Even tho Arch users swear that it is actually trivial to install and use for someone who is willing to read documentation, it is also known that distributions with significantly higher requirements on overall *nix knowledge like Gentoo, Oasis, KISS and Crux (?) exist. So my question is this: was Arch used to be harder to install and use? Because I heard bad things about Debian’s installation process too, even tho it is incredibly easy now. I also hear Ubuntu being bad for user privacy, even tho that whole Amazon thing happened years ago under a completely different management. Things move fast in Linux family’s world, was Arch a very different system back in 2006?
There used to be an installer, and it was, well, complicated. It tried to be very flexible while still streamlining the installation. When we removed all that and went with installation script approach instead, things became simpler and even more flexible (since what can be more flexible than the command line). I still think this is the best OS installer I have ever seen, and I’ve seen some.
Also, before the systemd change was completed, the init system and supporting tools were not quite as robust. So that created all kinds of complications.
Everything that is developed with a clear focus gets better with time.