[codabrink]

>The installation process may take a while (several hours.. or less)

It depends on what you're talking about. With relatively fast internet (I have 20Mb/s), I can have a functional box up with my favorite DE in just an hour or so. It's true that I configure things here and there for the next couple days as I need them, and each configuration is simple and only takes a second or two, but several hours seems a lot longer than the average install to me.

[botker]

My first Arch install took well over a couple hours, and was a pleasurably educational hassle. I think it took me over a day to get the system completely working back then. And that was despite my background using Slackware. But every time I've installed since then, the duration has more-or-less halved, and my most recent install was easily under 30 minutes.

The biggest gotcha for me as a newcomer was trying to install on a laptop, having no ethernet access handy, and not knowing that I'd need to install wireless_tools when running through the initial setup in order to get online.

The amount of time it takes varies greatly according to what you consider to be complete. I never stop tweaking my system, and there are always some points of dissatisfaction with it. But Arch is a great distro. It's very well-documented, and is pretty much delightful to configure.

[yule]

Two things helped me a lot with my Archlinux installation:

1) I previously tried in a virtual machine 2) I had a second machine next to mine to look up stuff in the wiki and follow the installation guide.

[sirclueless]

I agree. Arch Linux configuration is educational and well worth the few hours it takes on your first try, but you should definitely have another computer with the wiki open while you do it.

[swasheck]

I can't recommend this configuration enough. The wiki is super-informative and got me out of many jams during setup.

[Nic0]

It's true that Arch might be fast to install, and can get something working very fast, in less than half an hour, but this post is aims for beginners, and it's probably not that fast for them, so I thing it's better to say "you wanna try Arch? take a day, and do it with the documentation". It seems to me more fair than say 30min top, you have Arch. You probably won't disappointed new users, with wrong surprise when few hours after they still stuck without Xorg running.