It's better to use

    stack --install-ghc $whatever_command

which gets you the version of GHC you need to be able to run $whatever_command into ~/.stack if you don't have it. Much less brittle than a system-wide installation, and perfect for working with multiple GHCs. Anecdotally: I setup the Arch Linux machine I'm typing this on yesterday. I installed[1] Stack/GHC before xorg :)

[1]: It was so that I could run Aura: https://github.com/aurapm/aura