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I've recently installed Arch on two different laptops.

The first one was an old netbook. I hadn't done an Arch install in a long time (I've been spoiled by the simplicity and convenience of the Wubi installer) and wanted the learning experience. I also wanted the HDD to be encrypted using dmcrypt and LUKS.

The main problem I had was wrapping my head about the various partition schemes. This was made more difficult by my insistence to have the HDD be encrypted which meant I needed a separate /boot partition along with the special 1MB linux boot partition required to use GPT with BIOS (I missed that in the instructions and it tripped me up for quite a while). Altogether, it took three fresh installs before everything was exactly the way I wanted it but the last one was quite quick and was really on a fresh install because I wanted to make absolutely sure I had everything nailed down.

The second laptop was a midrange, 2 year old HP "media"-style laptop. With my new knowledge, partitioning and installing was easy even while maintaining an existing Windows install. But this laptop has both Intel and Nvidia graphics shared via PowerXpress whereas the netbook has simple Intel graphics. I still haven't taken a stab at the proprietary drivers but using the open source intel and nvidia graphics in tandem (after some fumbling around but it seemed counterintuitive to simply install both drivers side-by-side) it works well enough for what I'm using it for. I don't really relish the prospect of installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers, though.

I've probably spent 20 hours installing Arch on both of these machines but I've learned a lot in the process. It's been good.