To be fair Arch comes with a lot of prebuilt and preconfigured stuff plus utilities, abstracting A LOT away from you. Prime example is getting a desktop to run:

To be fair Arch comes with a lot of prebuilt and preconfigured stuff plus utilities, abstracting A LOT away from you. Prime example is getting a desktop to run: For example install the gnome package, enable gdm and install the driver package for your GPU (xf86-video-whatever) and ... you are done. Having dealt with LFS and "back in the day"-BSDs that's usually a real pain to do. Sure, you need to install the system by "hand" (pacstrap, cough) and have to configure this and that (like redirecting genfstab output, cough), but it's far far far away to be remotely from scratch. Sure, you learn more than through the average Ubuntu-like installer, but how modules work or that they even exist is something even the most Arch users don't know.