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> I had been using Arch for over 5 years and I really enjoyed it but these days it's just not worth the effort. I had to format my hard drive and start from scratch and just didn't want to go through the pain of setting everything up to what it was before so I just went straight to Xubuntu.

The installation work can be trivially automated with a shell script (note though that the Arch wiki generally discourages this). The benefits of this are that in the process of creating the script, one has a good sense of the installation process and can customize it, unlike the case of Ubuntu and many other distros where a lot of stuff happens behind the scenes. The con is that this script needs to be kept up to date with the (occasional) change in the Arch project.

I have had good success with this method - over the past 2 years and 3 fresh installs on laptops and a desktop. Basically, with a new laptop and a reasonably fast internet connection, I can go from the USB installation medium to a complete desktop environment tailored for my needs with everything configured correctly in ~ 10-15 minutes, with minimal interaction needed during the process (only to set things like the password).

Also note that in most use cases some post installation tweaking gets done, such as the installation of new applications as per interest.

So there are primarily 2 things the script can handle: 1. The annoying "low level work" - network configuration, boot loader configuration, etc. This should be relatively stable and fixed across a variety of hardware.

2. Application specific configuration needs (e.g vimrc, .bashrc). This may evolve over time/usage patterns - for this one can try keeping the script up to date, or not bother and simply focus on 1 above.