It's not too hard, if you know what you're doing. It's trite, but read the stinkin' wiki; it's very good. Some people are intimidated by the cli; it's a matte

It's not too hard, if you know what you're doing. It's trite, but read the stinkin' wiki; it's very good. Some people are intimidated by the cli; it's a matter of personal preference, but it's marginally faster if you know what you're doing. It's not really hard to fix (compared to other distros), and I've had a stable system which I don't touch much for quite a while. It took a while to configure (back up your dotfiles!), but these days I just leave it alone. You can tinker, but you can also just use your system. I think arch gets the "constantly-needs-tinkering" reputation because many of its users like tinkering, not because your system dies every time you `pacman -Syu`. As pointed out by others, pacman is that good. Much faster than others, better dependency resolution, and AUR. From a productivity stand-point, AUR allows me to avoid the significant tedium of cloning, fiddling with, and cajoling a git package to build.