"when I want to install the mysql ruby gem, but I can't because it can't find the headers, so I have to go hunt down if I want mysql-client-dev, mysql-devel, or

"when I want to install the mysql ruby gem, but I can't because it can't find the headers, so I have to go hunt down if I want mysql-client-dev, mysql-devel, or something else." While I'm sympathetic to your issues with RH (I recently left it - again) what you describe there is ridiculous. yum install mysql mysql-server mysql-devel .. that's it. Now if you'd complained about the version of mysql that installed then I would heartily endorse your criticism but c'mon - there is nothing wrong with the above command. And having to remember weird flags for pacman ("-Syu" to update? wtf?) is far worse. In fact, when I saw that it pretty much made me lose interest in playing with Arch at all. I love unix but pointless arcanity is stupid and user-hostile. "yum update" (or "apt-get upgrade") are much easier to remember, with no loss in functionality, and seeing complexity for complexity's sake like that in Arch is a bad sign to me.